How did you start your affiliation with HKU Med?
Soon after graduating from this medical school in 2010, I joined the Faculty as one of the most junior members. Despite the relative inexperience in teaching, I was acutely aware of the room for improvement in the MBBS curriculum, having freshly completed the course myself. In those days I found pre-clinical students frequently struggled to see the relevance of the basic sciences in their future practice and became disinterested. Concepts outside the core medical teaching such as medical humanities, personal resilience, and social awareness were hardly discussed.

How would you describe your teaching style?
Clinical teaching has been my passion and focus, and I positioned myself as an approachable near-peer to the students, such that they feel less embarrassed to clarify any uncertainties in the curriculum they may have. I emphasized principles and concepts in my PBL tutorials and bedside teachings, and helped students develop problem-solving skills by integrating basic sciences and knowledge of different specialties into their clinical reasoning. I like to make students think from different perspectives using role-play in tutorials. I tried to introduce humanities and ethics concepts and challenged the students to consider social and personal aspects of patients and the system of care.

What is the most creative thing you have done to engage your students?
Recently, Telemedicine is gaining importance as a practical need and an efficient means of delivering many aspects of medical care. Having witnessed its potential during an overseas elective, I pioneered to adapt this to MBBS bedside teaching early on as classes were suspended due to the pandemic. This served more than a temporary contingency, and represented an opportunity to equip our graduates with unique clinical skills required for telemedicine consultation, which is set to become an integral part of medicine in the near future. With like-minded colleagues, we obtained a Teaching Development Grant and are formally introducing telemedicine to the curriculum, and producing clinical skills handbook and teaching materials. We want our students to be competent, humanistic and adaptable practitioners with integrity. As teachers of HKU Med, we should uphold fundamental principles and innovate to keep up with the times.

What does this recognition mean for you?
Many passionate clinical teachers in our MBBS curriculum are unrecognized. I would like to use the opportunity to encourage the Faculty to recognize and give due credit to the exceptional teaching work that our academic colleagues and honorary teaching staff provide. The more I engage in teaching, the more I realize clinical medicine education is a specialty of its own that requires dedicated training. Perhaps the Faculty should look into incentivizing our clinical teachers to be trained and qualified in medical education.