Published on 02 August 2024

A New Chapter

Professor Joseph Sung
Distinguished University Professor
Senior Vice-President (Health & Life Sciences)
Dean, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine

2024 is a very special year for Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine. This year, we graduate our seventh cohort of medical graduates, a total of 145 of them joining the healthcare profession. This year, we admit the first cohort of students who are taking the NTU MBBS programme accredited by the Singapore Medical Council. This year, we increase our intake of medical students, an increase of more than three-fold from our beginnings in 2013. This year, our headquarters building celebrates its 100^th birthday and put on fresh paint, enhanced sustainable features, and newly refurbished windows. This year, we put a new logo on our walls, the most prominent of them atop our 20-storey Clinical Sciences Building at the Novena campus. 2024 is indeed a new chapter for LKCMedicine!

To start a new medical school is anything but an easy task. From gaining support of the government and respective ministries, to raising funds for the hardware and software of the School; from establishing a solid and robust curriculum to obtaining accreditation of professional bodies; from recruiting top educators and scientists as our faculty to establishing enduring partnerships with teaching hospitals across the country; from gaining trust of parents and the public to building our reputation in the international arena – it is an arduous job requiring the dedication and commitment of a team of leaders and innovators with vision and determination to make this a success.

As we celebrate our achievements, we have to thank past NTU President Professor Bertil Anderson for his vision as well as the leadership team at NTU. No words are enough to express our gratitude to founding chairman Mr Lim Chuan Poh and members of the Governing Board who have been guiding the development of the School since its inception. We are grateful for the generous donations of the Lee Foundation and other philanthropists whose support have been absolutely instrumental to the success of the School. Thanks also goes to our co-founder Imperial College London for their support and guidance in the past 14 years and we look forward to further collaborations in research. Importantly, we thank all the teachers (senior consultants and consultants of the three hospital clusters) and tutors from the National Healthcare Group for teaching and nurturing our students, providing early clinical exposure and pastoral care to our students.

Now we are turning a new page of LKCMedicine. We have a new logo and a revised mission statement that reads “We advance the practice and science of medicine through education and research for the good of humanity. Our doctors are whom you and I would like caring for us”. It emphasises our vision to redefine medicine and transform healthcare through innovation while staying true to the humanity of medicine. In all our endeavours, we recognise the power of technology in medical science and healthcare. And we have inserted new elements into our MBBS curriculum: these include digital health, artificial intelligence and medicine, humanity and patient safety. We are embarking on new explorations in healthcare and research and expanding on behavioural medicine, environmental health and early diagnosis of disease and health protection. The emphasis on doctor-patient relationship is evermore important and to signal this, we are launching a new patient-centred research programme called OPEN that engages patient advocates in our research and teaching. We have now expanded our overseas exchange and training network for our medical students and will open new centres for student exchange and attachment. Just as important, we are leveraging on the strengths of other disciplines in NTU so that we can build strong inter-disciplinary research programmes such as AI in Medicine, Climate Change and Environmental Health, and Science of Learning and Cognition research.

Looking ahead, LKCMedicine will gather more talents from different parts of the world and from various disciplines to join our teaching and research team. We will update our equipment in education (e.g. virtual reality and simulation facilities) and research (e.g. genomics and imaging facilities) to provide the best teaching and learning environment for our students and faculty. Our resolve to build an Academic Health System with NHG is stronger than ever – a strategic partnership with our hospital cluster for teaching and research. At the same time, we are ramping up our research collaboration with Imperial, while aiming to proliferate our network to Yale University, MIT, University of British Columbia, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and University of Edinburgh.

We are excited to turn a new chapter in the book of LKCMedicine!