Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1979

I have been involved in medical planning in one form or another for many years. However, I am sorry to have to say that in the United Kingdom many, although not quite all of the projects about which m y advice has been sought at one time or another, have never come to fruition, and sometimes when even on the very brink of realization have been swept away owing to constant and seemingly unpredictable fluctuations in the Country's economic climate. While I do not propose to enlarge on this matter, I mention it merely to emphasize what a very great pleasure it is to be associated with an undertaking which, as must be quite obvious to every interested person, is quite literally not only a growing concern but one which is growing at a truly remarkable rate. Medical Education In asking me to address the Congregation the Vice-Chancellor suggested that it might be appropriate for m e to say something about medical education. This, therefore, is what I propose to do. Interested friends and colleagues at home have quite often asked me what kind of medical curriculum The Chinese University's new Medical School will offer its students. Will the course be taught in Chinese or English? Will it follow the pattern of medical education of British medical schools or those of some other country? What attention if any will be paid to traditional Chinese medicine? Before attempting to answer these questions I should stress, perhaps, that the Medical Academic Advisory Committee is agreed that it should not take upon itself the task of planning the curriculum in any detail, believing that this should lie firmly in the hands of the Dean, the various Professors and other members of staff whose responsibility it will eventually be to teach the students and who will no doubt and in due course constitute themselves into such academic boards as are necessary to carry matters forward. This, however, does not mean that the Medical Academic Advisory Committee should absolve itself from giving advice on certain broad principles, which it believes should be seriously considered. Indeed, it would be an impossible task to plan schedules of accommodation, to advise on the many facilities that are and will be required and to make recommendations about staffing structures without bearing these broad princip in mind. Other reasons why the Committee should not concern itself with detailed curricular planning are that it is of course, called together only from time to time and when sufficient business requiring full consultation with the Dean has been collected. Likewise, its life is limited, for when its remit has been completed, probably in 1987, when the first batch of students will be graduating it will be dissolved. It should be understood that a medical curriculum is not a static affair and therefore cannot be laid down once and for all. It should, indeed, be so shaped as to become an organism able to accommodate itself as smoothly as possible to ever-changing patterns of medical care. Furthermore, and due perhaps to the increasing influence of the mass media both here in Hong Kong and elsewhere, patients and their relatives are likely to continue to insist that their doctors are not only clinically competent but that their practice is up-to-date. This alone demands that medical educatio and training should be both flexible and forward- looking. Medium of Instruction 一 Chinese or English? Will the medical course be taught in Chinese or English? The answer, of course, is both. The vast majority of the World's medical literature 一 both textbooks and journals—are published in the English language not only in the United States and the United Kingdom but in a growing number of other countries where English has inevitably become the main medium of medical communication. Some of the teachers in the new Medical School—those particularly concerned with the preclinical part of the course in which anatomy, physiology and the other sciences basic to medical practice will be taught—will not necessarily