Hong Kong boasts some of Asia’s finest universities, with five ranking in the global top 100, and its two medical schools – at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) – sitting in the global top 40. While this academic prowess produces globally competitive investigators, clinicians, and academics, there are not currently enough of them to meet Hong Kong’s healthcare needs. Might a third medical school provide the solution to the city’s healthcare staffing woes?

Staffing Shortages

There are around 16,000 registered doctors in Hong Kong, a number that translates to 2.16 doctors for every 1,000 citizens. This means that Hong Kong lags behind other Asian economies like Singapore (2.8 doctors per 1,000 people) as well as South Korea and Japan (2.6). Moreover, less than half of Hong Kong’s doctors currently work in the public hospitals which serve almost 90 percent of patients in the city.

“This figure falls short of meeting the needs of a population exceeding seven million people,” says Professor Lo Yuk Lam, a historic figure in the Hong Kong biomedical research community and currently president of the HK Bio-Med Innotech Association. “The strain on the healthcare system is significant, with many residents relying on private hospitals due to long wait times and a shortage of public practitioners.”

While 590 students graduate from the HKU and CUHK medical schools every year – up from 250 in 2009 – the South China Morning Post estimates that Hong Kong will be short of 1,440 doctors in 2025 and 1,570 by 2030. Former Hospital Authority (HA) chairman Anthony Wu Ting-yuk suggests that both schools have inadequate resources to support a larger intake, despite working on expanding their capacity. This problem is being exacerbated by increasing numbers of professionals, including doctors, leaving the city in search of opportunities elsewhere; between 2021 and 2022 alone, Hong Kong lost about 140,000 workers across all industries according to Chief Executive John Lee.

To address this imbalance, the HA has implemented a series of measures to train and retain medical staff. Secretary for Health Professor Lo Chung-mau has stated that the government has invested HKD 30 billion (USD 3.85 billion) into HKU and CUHK’s medical training facilities and that the number of public hospital doctors increased by 260 in the fiscal year 2023-24. Lo also pointed out that the resignation rate dropped to 5.2 percent, down from 8.1 percent in 2021-22.

Michael Yang, senior VP for innovation & enterprise at CityUHK, adds that the HA is also hiring medical practitioners from outside Hong Kong to alleviate the burden on the public healthcare system. The Hong Kong government is now recognising medical qualifications under the Medical Registration Ordinance involving dozens of non-local universities from Australia, Canada, China, the UK, and the US.

Although authorities expect 250 non locally trained doctors to join the HA by the end of the year, former HA chairman Wu warns that relying on non-local doctors to practise in Hong Kong is not a sustainable solution in the long run amid a global shortage. Moreover, staffing is not the only issue. “Our healthcare system is facing myriad challenges especially in the context of recovery from a global pandemic, an ageing society, and limited resources,” adds Yang.

Three: The Magic Number?

To counter Hong Kong healthcare’s staffing challenges, the territory’s government are closely considering proposals to establish a third medical school. Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Baptist University have both indicated their interest in establishing a medical school in the city, but the frontrunner is Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), which has come with a more concrete proposal in collaboration with Imperial College, London.

HKUST president Professor Nancy Ip Yuk-yu has said that her institution is aiming to establish the school by mid-2027, potentially with the well-established Queen Elizabeth Hospital as a teaching facility, and with a satellite campus at the proposed Northern Metropolis on the border with the mainland.

Stakeholder reaction to the move has been largely positive, “Adding a new medical school could alleviate the pressure on our healthcare system by increasing the number of trained medical professionals, thus shortening wait times and improving access to healthcare services,” says Professor Lo.

He continues, “Moreover, a third medical school would foster greater competition among our educational institutions, which could drive improvements in both medical education and healthcare delivery. This expansion aligns with a broader strategy to enhance Hong Kong’s role as a centre for medical and scientific excellence.”

Professor Philip Chiu, newly appointed dean of the faculty of medicine at CUHK also welcomes the competition that another medical school would bring. “Just like a football match, although we are competitors in the game, we can drink beer afterwards.” he says.

However, although acknowledging the need to promote medical education, given the city’s dearth of doctors, Chiu does question whether Hong Kong possesses adequate resources, teaching staff, teaching materials and support from the HA for an additional medical school. Additionally, as Lo warns, “this process may take several years to fully realise; setting up medical schools here has historically been a lengthy and complex process.”

Getting Future-Fit

Elsewhere, there are moves not just to create more doctors via another medical school; but to make them future-fit and ready to tackle the most pressing healthcare challenges of the modern world.

CityUHK, for its part, has created an ‘Institute of Digital Medicine’ for the task. “Our strategy is to empower medical doctors and healthcare professionals with new technology – be it in engineering, AI, big data, or the life sciences – via our Institute of Digital Medicine,” explains Professor Yang. “This is a research institute, rather than a medical school, that brings together engineers, scientists, data scientists, AI specialists, medical doctors, and other healthcare practitioners to identify challenges and develop innovative solutions to solve them.”

On the academic side, the Institute already has partnerships in place with the National University of Singapore Medical School, Tsinghua University Medical School in Beijing and collaborations with Exeter University in the UK, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Cornell University Medical School in the US. It is also working with industry leaders in the digital medicine space such as JD Health, the healthcare platform on JD.com, often referred to as ‘the Amazon of China.’ JD Health is the largest online drug and healthcare product distributor in China, with over half a million patients consulting online every day.

“The issues that we are trying to address, such as preventing the next pandemic, or better serving an aging population, require new solutions, whether they be in terms of big data-driven prediction and prevention tools or homecare using robots that feed user data directly into the system,” proclaims Yang.

“Additionally, these solutions are not just for the seven million people that live in Hong Kong. The problems we are facing are the same around the world, we need to leverage a global partnership network to address these global challenges.”

Reversing the Trend

Whether these initiatives will be sufficient to redress the shortage of healthcare professionals in Hong Kong, sufficiently upskill them in the technologies of tomorrow, and support Hong Kong’s hoped-for transition into a biomedical research hub remains to be seen. “Unfortunately, there is no short-term solution,” concludes CUHK oncologist Dr Tony Mok. “Welcoming doctors in from mainland China could help, though this is controversial due to differences in healthcare systems and language. The only viable long-term solution is to train more doctors locally.”