The Department holds to our longstanding tradition in quality education and training for all these years. Our undergraduate teaching program provides, amongst many other medical schools, one of the most dedicated, comprehensive and in-depth curricula that equips students with the essential skills and basic principles for diagnosing and treating major psychiatric disorders of public health concern. We aim to familiarize students with the structure and functions of mental health services in Hong Kong and ultimately cultivate a psychiatric perspective in medical practice. The orientation is not to turn all our students into psychiatrists, but to train them to be psychologically sensitive and competent doctors, regardless of their chosen specialties. This is particularly important nowadays with the development of community-oriented mental health service that relies on close partnerships between other areas of medicine and mental health. Our undergraduate curriculum is delivered in a 9-week dedicated module in the Year 4 clinical clerkship. Students receive lectures, weekly tutorials and close clinical supervision by their clinical instructors over a the wide range of clinical exposures including ward rounds, outpatient sessions, consultation-liaison sessions, electroconvulsive therapy sessions, community outreaching service, private practice, day hospital and community rehabilitative facilities. Clinical teachings are delivered in NTE cluster hospitals as well as other regional psychiatric institutions or units such as Castle Peak Hospital, Kwai Chung Hospital, Kowloon Hospital and Tuen Mun Hospital. Through this nine-week clinical clerkship students are able to gain real sense of the substance of clinical psychiatry apart from theoretical aspects, which in some ways inspire many of our students to take up psychiatry as their life-long career. Our undergraduate curriculum leads to the Part I of Final MB Examination, that takes the form of a “Combined Clinical Examination” jointly organized by the our department and other Year 4 teaching departments at the end of the fourth year. Over the years it is heartwarming to see graduates with excellent performance in psychiatry joining our psychiatric internship and ultimately most of them become our colleagues.

Our clinical department is one of the accredited psychiatric training centres recognizable under both the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Hong Kong College of psychiatrists. We provide both pre-membership training and post-membership training that subsequently leads to the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine’s Fellowship. Apart from clinical medical education, we also providepostgraduate academic programmes leading to higher research degrees, i.e., MPhil, PhD, and MD. These programmes are popular among local and mainland Chinese mental health professionals. Our programmes have attracted many motivated and competent young scientists who produce high-quality research outputs on par with international standards. Their dissertation works were published in international peer-reviewed journals and some students received research prizes at various important international scientific conferences.