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

This article lays out the organisational structure of the Faculty of Medicine at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), its teaching hospitals, the research strengths of its clinical departments, and its Chinese medicine education, based on official sources. The Faculty is one of the largest in the University and lives in close symbiosis with the Prince of Wales Hospital; in 2021 it gained a second, self-financing teaching hospital, the CUHK Medical Centre. Together they form a major hub for medical education and healthcare on the eastern side of Hong Kong. For the Faculty's founding history and its founding Dean, see faculty-of-medicine-founding.md; for an in-depth profile of the Faculty (historical milestones and 19 teaching units), see 01-academics/deepdive-medicine.md.

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# 1. Organisational structure

According to the CUHK Faculty of Medicine's official page^※, the Faculty comprises five constituent Schools:

Beyond the five Schools, the Faculty also oversees a number of clinical departments (e.g. Medicine and Therapeutics, Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Paediatrics, Psychiatry), all of which use the Prince of Wales Hospital as their main clinical and teaching base. Full structural details are in 01-academics/deepdive-medicine.md.

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# 2. School of Biomedical Sciences

Of the five Schools, Biomedical Sciences is the youngest — and yet it is the foundation of the Faculty's pre-clinical teaching. According to an official press release^※, the School was formed in 2010 through the merger of four basic medical science departments — Anatomy, Biochemistry (Medicine), Pharmacology and Physiology — which had previously operated independently within the Faculty. In August of the same year, the post-graduate divisions of those four departments were consolidated into a single Division of Biomedical Sciences Graduate Studies, offering a seamless MPhil–PhD track.

From the outset, the School built its identity around research output: according to official figures, research funding grew by roughly 200% within the first few years of operation, and within just two years five projects had secured grants totalling HK$33 million from the Research Grants Council's Collaborative Research Fund. Publications in top-tier journals such as Nature also rose steadily. Research priorities centre on translational medicine, including stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, and brain and mind sciences. The founding School Head, Professor Chan Wood-yee, stated that the School's ambition was "to develop into a world-leading biomedical hub devoted to high-impact, interdisciplinary and translational research"; Professor Hsu Cho-tou (Hsu Cho-tou), a later CUHK Vice-Chancellor and a geneticist, also remarked that the School had already "nurtured the talent and research environment needed to build a world-leading biomedical hub".

On the teaching side, the School did not launch its undergraduate BSc in Biomedical Sciences until the 2016/17 academic year — for more than a decade beforehand, "biomedical science" education at CUHK had existed mainly as pre-med courses and post-graduate training. The hallmark of this undergraduate programme is that its electives are split into three concentration streams: "Biomedical Research", "Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship", and "Healthcare Services and Consulting", each paired with corresponding internships and experiential learning activities. According to official information, this design — embedding business-management and consulting tracks inside a biomedical sciences degree — was a first in Hong Kong. It also reflects the School's dual role within the Faculty: a supplier of pre-clinical foundation courses for clinical programmes such as MBChB, and, independently, a trainer of interdisciplinary talent bound for the biotech industry, policy and management.

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# 3. Prince of Wales Hospital (PWH)

According to official Faculty of Medicine materials^※:

• The Prince of Wales Hospital is the Faculty's principal teaching hospital, operated by the Hospital Authority. It sits next to the CUHK campus in Sha Tin and opened in 1984.
• As a regional acute hospital, PWH serves the residents of the East New Territories (including Sha Tin, Tai Po and the North District). It is the core hospital of the New Territories East Cluster, the largest in geographic reach of the Hospital Authority's seven hospital clusters.
• According to official figures, PWH has helped train more than 5,000 healthcare professionals and has supported a substantial volume of medical research.
• Specialist services at PWH include: anaesthesia, clinical oncology, an endoscopy centre, medicine, surgery, orthopaedics, paediatrics, obstetrics, psychiatry, ophthalmology, and more.

# 3.1 SARS (2003) and the hospital's pivotal role

During the SARS outbreak of 2003, the Prince of Wales Hospital was among the hardest-hit hospitals in Hong Kong — and one of the first in the world to identify a nosocomial SARS outbreak. The outbreak began with a single index patient on the hospital's 8A ward and, within ten days, had infected dozens of healthcare workers. The crisis generated critical clinical experience and data that shaped the city's response to the epidemic; the PWH team subsequently published studies based on first-hand data in leading journals including The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. For the full chronology, academic contributions and institutional impact of this episode, see prince-of-wales-and-sars.md.

The cost and value of the teaching hospital model: The vulnerability PWH exposed during SARS — wards simultaneously holding patients, nurses, doctors, medical students and visitors amid dense and constant movement — is precisely a structural feature of the "teaching hospital" model. Yet it was precisely because the hospital combined care, teaching and research in one place that the PWH team could, in the midst of the crisis, turn the clinical front line into academic publications that the world could learn from. This duality — fragility and rapid knowledge production side by side — is the key to understanding CUHK's teaching hospital system.

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# 4. CUHK Medical Centre (CUHKMC)

The CUHK Medical Centre, which opened on 6 January 2021, is a private teaching hospital located on Chak Cheuk Street on the University campus in Sha Tin. It is the Faculty of Medicine's second teaching hospital after the Prince of Wales Hospital:

• Construction began on 8 December 2016. Under publicly available figures, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust pledged HK$1.3 billion in August 2014, and the government provided loans totalling HK$4.033 billion, with the first tranche released on 20 March 2017. The Centre's funding therefore combined three sources: a Jockey Club donation, government loans, and the University's own resources.
• It is operated by CUHK Medical Centre Limited, a company wholly owned by the University, on a self-financing, not-for-profit basis. The aim is to deliver patient-centred care in the private market while keeping academic and clinical work tightly integrated; surpluses are reinvested in the hospital's long-term development and in supporting the Faculty's teaching and research.
• The building rises 14 storeys with a floor area of about 100,000 square metres, comprising several interconnected towers arranged around two inner courtyards. At full operation it provides 516 inpatient beds, 103 day beds, 28 operating theatres and 49 consultation rooms, houses 16 specialist medical centres, and offers 24-hour emergency outpatient services.
• According to public information, the Centre is Hong Kong's first "smart hospital", integrating electronic medical records, a patient digital platform and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications into daily operations.
• Construction was supported by numerous named donations (including from the Wu Yee Sun Charitable Foundation, among others).
• It is one of the few private teaching hospitals in the Asia-Pacific region located on a university campus.

A "public plus private" teaching hospital system: With PWH and CUHKMC operating side by side, the Faculty runs a dual track of "public teaching hospital + private teaching hospital". The former bears a heavy load of public health services and accumulates regional acute cases (as its role during SARS showed), while the latter offers medical students a different kind of clinical setting, marked by smart-hospital technology and a patient-centred service model. The two are complementary rather than substitutes: at PWH, students witness a high-pressure public system; at CUHKMC, they encounter the frontier of a digital, private healthcare service. For the Centre's funding structure, phased opening, role during the pandemic and the early repayment of government loans in 2026, see the dedicated article cuhk-medical-centre-private-teaching-hospital.md.

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# 5. The Nethersole School of Nursing

• The School takes its name from the Nethersole legacy, which traces back to one of Hong Kong's oldest traditions of nurse training. According to the English Wikipedia article "The Nethersole School of Nursing"^※, the earliest hospital-based nursing school in Hong Kong was established in 1893 within the Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Hospital system — the city's first hospital-based nurse training school.
• CUHK's modern nursing education began in 1991, when a Department of Nursing was set up under the Faculty of Medicine, offering a post-registration Bachelor of Nursing programme; from 1995 it also offered a pre-registration Bachelor of Nursing course.
• On 1 January 2002, with support from the Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Charity Foundation, the department was formally renamed the "Nethersole School of Nursing" (那打素护理学院), carrying forward the spirit of a nursing education tradition that began in 1893.
• The School offers bachelor's, master's and doctoral programmes in nursing.
• In the QS 2026 subject rankings, nursing ranked 6th globally (see rankings.md) — one of CUHK's highest-ranked subjects worldwide. In the QS 2025 subject rankings, nursing was ranked 1st in Hong Kong and in Asia, and 5th globally — the first time the discipline had entered the global top five.

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# 6. School of Pharmacy

• According to the School of Pharmacy's official "Introduction" page^※, CUHK's Bachelor of Pharmacy programme began in 1992 — the first pharmacy programme funded by the University Grants Committee (UGC) in Hong Kong.
• The programme is a four-year full-time professional degree, accredited by the Pharmacy and Poisons Board of Hong Kong, and is one of the statutory routes to registration as a practising pharmacist in Hong Kong.
• According to School sources, graduates of the School account for about one-quarter of currently practising pharmacists in Hong Kong — roughly one in every four pharmacists working in the city trained at CUHK, underlining the School's weight in the local supply of pharmacy talent.
• Research integrating Chinese and Western medicine is one of the Faculty's distinctive directions, with collaborative agreements in place with mainland Chinese medicine universities.

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

• The School's origins lie in the "School of Public Health" founded in 2001 — according to public information, Hong Kong's first school of public health, marking the discipline's formal establishment within the territory's higher-education system.
• In 2009, the School of Public Health merged with the former Department of Community and Family Medicine to form the present Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care. That same year saw the first cohort of BSc Public Health graduates.
• According to the School's official materials, it was the first school of public health in Hong Kong to offer flagship programmes with concentrations in line with international standards, and it has built a collaboration network with more than 90 institutions across four continents and 19 countries.
• Sharing the Jockey Club funding lineage but organisationally separate, the Jockey Club Institute of Ageing (established 2014) is another interdisciplinary platform in the Faculty focused on age-friendly cities and gerontology policy initiatives. Its history and research are covered in jockey-club-institute-of-ageing.md.

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# 8. The School of Chinese Medicine

• The discipline of Chinese medicine traces back to a Chinese medicine research group attached to the Faculty of Science in 1975. It was formally established as a School in 1998 — among the earliest Chinese medicine degree programmes in Hong Kong (the same year as Hong Kong Baptist University's) — and was transferred from the Faculty of Science into the Faculty of Medicine on 1 July 2013.
• The School offers the Bachelor of Chinese Medicine (BChinMed), taught and research master's, and doctoral programmes. It operates a Chinese medicine specialist clinic and clinical education and research centre, providing Chinese medicine consultations to the public, and runs clinical placements in collaboration with mainland institutions including the Shenzhen Hospital of Chinese Medicine.
• Research integrating Chinese and Western medicine is one of the Faculty's distinctive directions, with collaborative agreements with a number of mainland Chinese medicine universities.
• For the full history of the School's establishment, its programme structure and its positioning as a "parallel Chinese-and-Western" academic unit, see the dedicated article school-of-chinese-medicine.md.

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# 9. The MBChB programme and admissions

Beyond the five Schools, the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB) is the Faculty's flagship programme — the one the public watches most closely and the most competitive to enter. Every year after HKDSE results are released, "which medical school did the top scorers choose?" becomes the talk of the town.

Curriculum: According to the official programme page^※, the MBChB takes six years of normal study. It is divided into a pre-clinical phase (Years 1–3, covering basic sciences such as anatomy, physiology, pathology and molecular medicine, threaded throughout with medical ethics, clinical skills and doctor–patient communication training) and a clinical phase (Years 4–6, in which students rotate through specialties at the teaching hospitals, including medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics, anaesthesia and intensive care, clinical oncology, diagnostic imaging and interventional radiology, emergency medicine, ophthalmology, otorhinolaryngology, and orthopaedics and traumatology). The curriculum also includes the Global Physician-Leadership Stream (GPS), an enhanced track for students aiming at research careers or cross-border healthcare leadership roles.

Places and entry routes: From 2025, the Faculty will offer a total of 300 undergraduate places through the HKDSE and Non-JUPAS routes combined, plus 25 places on the Graduate Entry Track (GET) for applicants who already hold a bachelor's degree. The GET route compresses the normal six-year curriculum into four years, and is the Faculty's newer admissions channel for those seeking to switch into medicine from other fields. The Faculty sets no fixed quota between JUPAS and Non-JUPAS, admitting flexibly on the calibre of applicants.

Competitiveness: According to an official Faculty press release^※ (published 7 August 2024), in the 2024/25 academic year the Faculty admitted 212 HKDSE candidates, accounting for 72% of total intake that year — the seventh consecutive year in which DSE (JUPAS) admissions made up over 70% of places. Of the eight "top scorers" in that year's HKDSE (achieving 5** in six or more subjects), five chose to study medicine at CUHK; among candidates with 5** in four or more subjects, about seven in ten chose the GPS stream; and of the TOP 100 HKDSE candidates in Hong Kong who opted for medicine, nearly half chose CUHK. According to the same release, the median admission score for the GPS stream was 40.5 points (out of a maximum of 42 across six subjects) — the eleventh consecutive year it has recorded the highest median admission score of any university programme in Hong Kong. These figures are the direct evidence for why CUHK's medical school is seen as the hardest medical degree to get into in Hong Kong.

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# 10. Global subject rankings

The Faculty's subjects occupy uneven positions in international rankings: nursing is a clear standout, while undergraduate medicine sits in the upper-middle tier. According to the QS 2026 subject rankings (Medicine)^※, CUHK's medicine ranks 37th globally — among the best in Hong Kong, but some distance behind the global top three (Harvard, Oxford and Stanford) and several leading medical schools in the region. In contrast, nursing — as noted in Section 5 above — ranks 6th globally in the QS 2026 subject rankings, the highest of any Faculty discipline and one of CUHK's global benchmarks across all subjects (see rankings.md).

This pattern of "nursing leads, medicine sits mid-tier" echoes, to some extent, the Faculty's own trajectory. Clinical medicine competes against centuries-old schools like Oxford and Harvard, where catching up is a long game; nursing, by contrast, is a relatively young discipline — its department was only set up in 1991 and upgraded in 2002 — and has found it easier to climb international ranking tables through staffing intensity, research output and regional influence. For prospective students, this means that "choosing CUHK medicine" and "choosing CUHK nursing" are judgments of quite different magnitudes on the international ranking map.

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# 11. Clinical research strengths

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

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# 12. The Dean

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

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# 13. The Faculty's place in the CUHK academic system

The Faculty of Medicine is one of the younger of CUHK's eight Faculties — founded in 1981, nearly two decades after the original three Faculties of Arts, Science and Social Science at the University's 1963 founding — yet it has grown rapidly into one of the largest Faculties and one with the most visible external influence. This is inseparable from Hong Kong's position as an international healthcare and biotechnology hub. The chronology of the five Schools reveals a clear expansion trajectory: nursing and pharmacy departments established in 1991/1992, a school of public health breaking new ground for Hong Kong in 2001, the School of Biomedical Sciences in 2010, and the School of Chinese Medicine joining in 2013. In just over three decades, the Faculty has grown from a single school of clinical medicine into a comprehensive medical education system spanning Western clinical medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, biomedical sciences and Chinese medicine. This expansion, combined with four decades of clinical accumulation at the Prince of Wales Hospital and the opening of the CUHK Medical Centre in 2021, makes up the Faculty's present-day map.

The Faculty's "bigness" also shows up in two extremes — at the admissions end and at the output end. At one end, MBChB/GPS has held the highest median admission score of any university programme in Hong Kong for eleven consecutive years (Section 9); at the other, nursing has ranked in the QS global top six for years running (Section 10). These two sets of numbers — one meaning "hardest to get into", the other "most outstanding in output" — together underpin the Faculty's position among CUHK's eight Faculties as the largest and the most concentrated in reputation.

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# Further reading

• 中大医院开业考：2021年香港首家智慧私家教学医院
• 威尔斯亲王医院与 2003 年 SARS：中大教学医院的临床史
• 医学院创立与创院院长
• 中医学院：1998 年香港最早一批中医学位课程之一
• 赛马会老年学研究所
• 医学院深度档案（五学院·临床学系）
• 中大全球学科排名总览

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