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APPENDIX
Notes on projects mentioned in letter of 29th April, 1948.
1. Teaching Hospital.
The University may hope for about two hundred beds in the Government Hospital (the Queen Mary Hospital) and sixty beds in a Government Maternity Hospital. Royal Navy which is at present in possession of half the wards
This assumes that the of the Queen Mary Hospital can be persuaded to to a new hospital that it has bought but has not yet reconditioned.
remove its cases The Queen Mary Hospital of. about five hundred beds is primarily for casualties and for the treatment of Government officers and servants, about twelve thousand in all, resident on the Island of Hong Kong, and only after this is it to be regarded as a general hospital for the public. University
Consequently both the and the Medical Department suffer. insufficient beds for teaching, the Medical Department in-
We have sufficient for the public. Hitherto we have had to use such accommodation as the Government Medical Department could spare for us to teach roughly ninety students in the clinical years: we now have to make provision for at least one hundred and eighty students. We cannot get additional beds in Government Hospitals: we must look elsewhere.
2.
In the past when a University medical teacher was on leave we have been compelled to appoint in his place a Govern- ment Medical Officer, not necessarily the man that the University would have chosen but the man who was at the time available for a hospital appointment. We could not get the services of a specialist private practitioner as such men have not access to Government hospitals.
It is another aspect of the same limitation that we have never been able to employ as teachers of special branches of medicine or surgery specialists in private practice. meant that nearly all tea hing has been given by the three full
It has time professors in medicine, in surgery or in gynaecology, each with his two assistants, normally men of his own training. Such additional teaching as has been possible has depended on there being a Government Medical Officer competent in a special branch and on the possibility of his being made available to do some teaching. We have been compelled to recognise that our inability to make use of such specialist skill as is to be found among private practitioners has unduly narrowed our teaching in medicine, in surgery and in gynaecology.
We must have more clinical teachers for this reason and also because we must look forward to a permanent increase in our numbers of students, mostly because of the gap in train- ing in the war years but also because the movement away from Chinese traditional to Western medicine is now marked: indication of the success achieved by scientific medical teaching.
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3. These considerations have led us to negotiate with the Trustees of a Chinese Charitable Trust which has built and equipped three hospitals the nature of which has changed by the trend towards Western methods of treatment. hospitals built about fifteen years ago is excellently planned
One of the and could fairly easily be converted into a teaching hospital
of three hundred beds with a very adequate Out-patients Department. Agreement with the Trustees hitherto impossible, now is made easier by the decline of the income of the Trust as a result of war losses and its dependence on the Government for
the