Bulletin No. 2, 2012

34 Chinese University Bulletin No. 2, 2012 Orthopaedician Awarded for Teaching Excellence P rof. Shekhar M. Kumta , Profes sor in the Depar tment of Or thopaedi c s and Traumatology of CUHK’s Faculty of Medicine, was awarded a 2012 UGC Award for Teaching Excellence by the University Grants Committee. Professor Kumta joined CUHK in 1989 and has won many CUHK teaching awards including the Vice-Chancellor’s Exemplary Teaching Award. He has made extensive use of an e-learning platform that simulates complex cases and allows students to learn individually at their own pace before gaining practical experience with real patients. He has also developed the innovative Formative Assessment Case Studies (FACS) e-learning platform, in which students make complex management and diagnostic decisions and receive formative feedback. As a young man in India, Kumta became captivated with the full array of facilities, equipment and procedures of the emergency treatment regime in a hospital and how they helped a family friend to recover after his legs were fractured. ‘I decided, there and then, that medicine would be my career and helping others as a medical practitioner my goal in life.’ His approach to medical education, which emphasizes the contextual relevance of patients’ problems to the underlying basic science through the structured exposure of students to clinical cases, has been widely praised and included in the AMEE (Association of Medical Education in Europe) Guides to Clinical Teaching as a blueprint for other clinical teachers. However, Professor Kumta is too seasoned a medical practitioner to ignore that cure is administered by people as much as by technology. He does not only sharpen the mind of his students but also prepares their souls for the many tough choices and decisions lying ahead in their career. In one particularly impressive project, he allowed and closely supervised his students and interns to come into close contact with patients with terminal bone cancer so as to cultivate their sense of empathy through eye- witnessing the pain and suffering of terminally ill patients. Professor Kumta considers it a privilege to be given the opportunity to teach, for teaching comes with responsibility. ‘What we teach and the way we teach will touch the lives of many countless others.’ He has decided to use the award money for the cost-effective development and application of mobile learning technology in the delivery of healthcare and health science education, and to run workshops which will facilitate knowledge and skills transfer among medical and health students and practitioners. Photo by Keith Hiro