CUHK Faculty of Medicine — Structure, Teaching Hospitals, and Research Strengths

This article maps the organisational structure, teaching hospitals, clinical research strengths, and Chinese medicine education of the Faculty of Medicine at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), drawn from official sources. The Faculty is one of the largest at CUHK and is symbiotically linked with the Prince of Wales Hospital. In 2021, it added a self-financing CUHK Medical Centre, and together they form a key medical education and healthcare hub for eastern Hong Kong. For the faculty's founding history and founding dean, see faculty-of-medicine-founding.md; for a deep-dive faculty profile (historical milestones, the 19 teaching units), see 01-academics/deepdive-medicine.md.

# 1. Organisational Structure

According to the CUHK Faculty of Medicine official page^※, the Faculty comprises five schools:

Beyond the five schools, the Faculty also oversees numerous clinical departments (e.g., Department of Medicine and Therapeutics, Department of Surgery, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Department of Paediatrics, Department of Psychiatry), all of which use the Prince of Wales Hospital as their primary clinical training and teaching site. For institutional details, see 01-academics/deepdive-medicine.md.

# 2. Prince of Wales Hospital (PWH)

According to CUHK Faculty of Medicine official materials^※:

• The Prince of Wales Hospital is the Faculty's primary teaching hospital, operated by the Hospital Authority (HA). It is adjacent to CUHK's main Shatin campus and was officially commissioned in 1984.
• As a regional acute hospital, PWH serves residents of the New Territories East region (including Sha Tin, Tai Po, and North District). It is the core hospital of the New Territories East Cluster, the geographically largest of the Hospital Authority's seven hospital clusters.
• According to official figures, PWH has helped train over 5,000 healthcare professionals and has supported extensive medical research.
• PWH's specialist services include: anaesthesiology, clinical oncology, endoscopy centre, internal medicine, surgery, orthopaedics, paediatrics, obstetrics, psychiatry, ophthalmology, and others.

# 2.1 SARS (2003) and the Hospital's Critical Role

During the 2003 SARS epidemic, PWH was one of the hardest-hit hospitals in Hong Kong and one of the first healthcare institutions to detect a nosocomial SARS outbreak. The outbreak began with a single index patient in Ward 8A, leading to dozens of healthcare worker infections within a matter of days. This crisis forged critical, frontline clinical experience and data for Hong Kong's epidemic response. The PWH team subsequently published primary-data-based research in leading journals like The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. For a complete timeline of this period, its academic contributions, and its systemic impact, see prince-of-wales-and-sars.md.

The cost and value of the teaching hospital model: The vulnerability that PWH exposed during SARS—the high density and mobility of patients, healthcare workers, medical students, and visitors in its wards—is precisely a structural feature of a "teaching hospital" model. Yet, it is also because of this integration of care, teaching, and research that the PWH team could rapidly turn a clinical frontline into globally instructive academic publications. Understanding this duality of "fragility" and "rapid knowledge generation" is crucial to grasping the teaching hospital system of CUHK's Faculty of Medicine.

# 3. CUHK Medical Centre (CUHKMC)

The CUHK Medical Centre, a private teaching hospital, officially opened on 6 January 2021. Located on Chak Cheung Street within the CUHK campus in Sha Tin, it is the Faculty of Medicine's second teaching hospital:

• The project broke ground on 8 December 2016. According to public records, The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust committed a donation of HK$1.3 billion in August 2014. The Hong Kong Government also provided a total loan facility of HK$4.033 billion, with the first tranche disbursed on 20 March 2017. The centre's construction was therefore a tripartite project enabled by a Jockey Club donation, a government loan, and university self-funding.
• The centre is operated by CUHK Medical Limited, a university-owned company, on a self-financing, not-for-profit basis. Its mission is to deliver patient-centred, academically integrated care in the private market, with all proceeds channelled towards the hospital's long-term development and supporting the Faculty of Medicine's teaching and research.
• The building has 14 storeys and a total construction floor area of approximately 100,000 square metres. It is composed of interconnected towers surrounding two inner courtyards. At full operation, it has 516 in-patient beds, 103 day-patient beds, 28 operating theatres, and 49 consultation rooms, along with 16 specialist medical centres and a 24-hour acute outpatient service.
• According to public records, it is Hong Kong's first "smart hospital", integrating electronic health records, a patient digital platform, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications into daily operations.
• The centre received multiple naming donations (including from the Wu Yee Sun Charitable Foundation).
• It is one of the few private teaching hospitals in the Asia-Pacific region to be situated on a university campus.

A "parallel public-private" teaching hospital system: The coexistence of PWH and CUHKMC gives CUHK's Faculty of Medicine a "public teaching hospital + private teaching hospital" parallel structure. The former shoulders a massive public healthcare load and accumulates caseloads of regional acute illness (as seen during SARS), while the latter—with "smart hospital" technical standards and a patient-centric service model—offers medical students training in a different clinical setting. The two are complementary, not substitutes: a student witnesses the high-pressure public system at PWH, and engages with the digital, privatised frontier of healthcare delivery at CUHKMC.

# 4. The Nethersole School of Nursing

• The school is named after the Nethersole legacy—a name traceable to one of Hong Kong's oldest traditions of nurse training. According to Wikipedia: The Nethersole School of Nursing^※, Hong Kong's first hospital-based nurse training school was established in 1893 under the Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Hospital system.
• The modern institutional form of nursing education at CUHK began in 1991, when it was established as the Department of Nursing under the Faculty of Medicine and launched a post-registration Bachelor of Nursing programme. From 1995, it expanded to offer a pre-registration Bachelor of Nursing programme.
• On 1 January 2002, with the support of the Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Charity Foundation, the department was officially renamed The Nethersole School of Nursing, honouring the spirit of a nurse-training tradition stretching back to 1893.
• The school offers Bachelor, Master, and Doctor of Nursing programmes.
• In the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026, Nursing is ranked 6th globally (see rankings.md), making it one of CUHK's highest-ranked subjects. In the 2025 rankings, it was ranked 1st in both Hong Kong and Asia, and 5th globally, the first time the discipline has broken into the global top five.

# 5. School of Pharmacy

• According to the School of Pharmacy's official "Introduction" page^※, CUHK's Bachelor of Pharmacy programme was launched in 1992. It was the first pharmacy degree programme in Hong Kong to be funded by the University Grants Committee (UGC).
• The four-year, full-time professional degree is accredited by the Pharmacy and Poisons Board of Hong Kong and is one of the statutory pathways for registration as a practising pharmacist in the city.
• According to the school, its graduates account for roughly one-quarter of all practising pharmacists in Hong Kong—meaning roughly one in every four pharmacists is a CUHK Pharmacy alumnus, underscoring the programme's weight in the local workforce pipeline.
• Integrative Chinese-Western medicine research is one of the faculty's signature directions, and it holds collaboration agreements with multiple mainland Chinese medicine universities.

# 6. The Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care

• The school's predecessor is the School of Public Health, established in 2001—according to public records, this was Hong Kong's first school of public health, marking the formal establishment of the discipline within the territory's higher education system.
• In 2009, the School of Public Health merged and restructured with the former Department of Community and Family Medicine to form the current entity. In the same year, the first cohort of Bachelor of Science in Public Health (BSc Public Health) students graduated.
• According to official school information, it is Hong Kong's first public health school to offer flagship programmes with international-standard concentrations, and has built a collaborative network with over 90 institutions across 19 countries on four continents.

# 7. The School of Chinese Medicine

• The discipline of Chinese Medicine at CUHK traces its earliest roots to a Chinese Medicine Research Group under the Faculty of Science in 1975. The school was formally established in 1998, making it one of the earliest degree programmes in the field in Hong Kong (same year as Hong Kong Baptist University). On 1 July 2013, it was transferred from the Faculty of Science and integrated into the Faculty of Medicine.
• It offers a Bachelor of Chinese Medicine (BChinMed), as well as taught and research-based Master's and PhD programmes. It operates specialist Chinese medicine clinics and clinical teaching and research centres, providing public clinical services and collaborating on clinical placements with mainland institutions such as Shenzhen Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital.
• Integrative Chinese-Western medicine research is a signature direction of the faculty, supported by collaboration agreements with numerous mainland Chinese medicine universities.
• For the complete history, curriculum, and the school's distinct "Chinese and Western medicine side-by-side" academic positioning, see the dedicated article: school-of-chinese-medicine.md.

# 8. Clinical Research Strengths

For detailed results in each area, see medical-research-and-national-awards.md and landmark-discoveries.md; for the clinical timeline and academic contributions at PWH during SARS, see prince-of-wales-and-sars.md.

# 9. Dean

According to a CUHK Communications and Public Relations Office press release^※, Professor Philip Chiu was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Medicine on 1 February 2024. He is also a co-founder of the Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (InnoHK). The Faculty's first founding dean was Professor Gerald Choa, appointed in 1977, who oversaw its establishment by 1981. For the founding history, see faculty-of-medicine-founding.md.

# 10. The Faculty's Position within CUHK's Academic System

The Faculty of Medicine was a latecomer among CUHK's eight faculties (established in 1981, nearly two decades after the 1963 founding faculties of Arts, Science, and Social Science), yet it rapidly grew into one of the University's largest and most internationally visible faculties—a trajectory inseparable from Hong Kong's positioning as an international hub for medicine and biotechnology. The timeline of the five schools traces a clear arc of expansion: Nursing and Pharmacy departments were established in 1991/1992; the School of Public Health broke new ground in Hong Kong in 2001; the School of Biomedical Sciences launched in 2010; and the School of Chinese Medicine was incorporated in 2013. Over a period of just over thirty years, the Faculty evolved from a singular institution of "only clinical medicine" into a comprehensive medical education system spanning Western clinical medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, biomedical sciences, and Chinese medicine. This expansion, together with forty years of clinical accumulation at the Prince of Wales Hospital and the 2021 inauguration of the CUHK Medical Centre, completes the Faculty's present-day landscape.