MUST’s medical program aims to produce int’l doctors

The new Bachelor of Medicine program at the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) is aiming to produce competent local doctors after six years.

Given the green light to operate the degree on Monday, dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences Dr Manson Fok stated that the university is keen to train these medical students to an international standard.

He added that MUST has the international recognition of over 20 universities willing to assist them.

In an interview with TDM, Fok mentioned that the professors – who are mainly doctors from Hong Kong – would run the curriculum.

“In doing our curriculum, we [will be] able to send our students overseas for part of the training. I think it’s a very exciting curriculum, which I don’t think is available anywhere else,” he said.

“I want to add also [that] we’re all starting fresh. We learn from mistakes from the past how not to train doctors,” said the dean.

For Fok, training doctors to an international standard is the university’s priority. He noted that the new curriculum is “more fulfilling than what is available.”

“Right now if you look at the statistics, the majority of the graduating doctors are from mainland China. They are trained in that standard and we hope to do something different,” said Fok.

“I’m not saying that [their] standards are not up to par, but I wish that we would train our doctors in an international standard and we would be able to learn a much broader sense of what well-community medicine is doing,” he added.

MUST has signed agreements with universities in Australia, the U.K., Portugal and the United States.

During the six-year course, the medical students have two to four opportunities to go abroad on exchange that lasts from six weeks to two months.

The dean also called on exceptional students to join the medical program, hinting that the university is willing to provide full scholarships to its top students.

With subsidies applied, the estimated cost of the bachelor’s degree is MOP55,000 per year for local residents, while the estimated cost for overseas students is MOP160,000.

The course will start small, recruiting between 35 and 50 students at its inception, most of them from local high schools. It will not initially focus on the recruitment of overseas students.

Tomorrow, the university will hold its Open Day, hoping to attract students to this field of study. LV