Teaching hospitals and the clinical network: Queen Mary, HA associate hospitals and the HKU–Shenzhen Hospital

This article belongs to Module 11 Medicine/Hospitals of the "Wild History of HKU", and is the teaching-hospital instalment of that module. It focuses on the clinical teaching base of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine — centred on Queen Mary Hospital, radiating out to the Hong Kong West Cluster and a network of Hospital Authority hospitals, with two further additions: a private teaching hospital (Gleneagles) and a jointly-run hospital in mainland China (HKU–Shenzhen Hospital). This instalment is about "the hospitals themselves": their establishment, scale, network links, role as transplant hubs, and their position in the public–private mix. For the Faculty's structure and curriculum, see ./li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md; for each clinical department's research strengths, see ./departments-and-strengths.md.

This module sits in reference zone 00–12 and carries no credibility badges. Data are current as of June 2026; every fact with a year or figure is sourced, and discrepancies are flagged side by side.

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# 1. The teaching-hospital system at a glance

Where the CUHK medical faculty draws on the New Territories East around Sha Tin, HKU's Faculty of Medicine follows a "Hong Kong West route" — its core clinical base is Queen Mary Hospital at Pok Fu Lam, reaching out through the Hong Kong West Cluster and, under arrangements with the Hospital Authority, conducting bedside teaching and clinical service in a number of public hospitals. On top of this sits one private teaching hospital and one jointly-run hospital in Shenzhen. To grasp HKU's medical map, these layers come first.

According to HKUMed's official page on "other HA hospitals and clinics with HKUMed"^※, the Faculty's clinical services and teaching activities extend beyond Queen Mary to a number of Hospital Authority hospitals, including Grantham Hospital, the Duchess of Kent Children's Hospital, Tsan Yuk Hospital, hospitals under the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals (Fung Yiu King Hospital, Tung Wah Hospital) and Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital, among others.

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# 2. Where the teaching hospital began: from Alice Memorial Hospital to Queen Mary

Queen Mary Hospital has been HKU's core clinical base since 1937 — but medical education and the "teaching hospital" had been tied together for a full half-century before that. To read the system, you have to go back to 1887.

That year, Ho Kai (何启), in memory of his late wife Alice Walkden, funded the Alice Memorial Hospital, which opened on Hollywood Road in Central. According to one account, the hospital opened on 16 February 1887 at 77–81 Hollywood Road, was managed by the London Missionary Society, and was the first hospital in Hong Kong to train Chinese in Western medicine^※. That same year, the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese was founded, and the Alice Memorial Hospital served as its teaching hospital^※ — fixing the city's "hospital + medical school" pattern from the outset. This College of Medicine was the direct predecessor of the HKU Medical Faculty; its history, including the stint of Sun Yat-sen among its first cohort, is told in ./hong-kong-college-of-medicine-1887.md.

After Alice Memorial came more hospitals under the same missionary system, together forming the early clinical teaching network. According to the Nethersole Charity Foundation's milestones^※, the Nethersole Hospital (那打素医院) opened on 5 September 1893 as the first hospital in Hong Kong to train nurses^※; a succession of institutions followed under the same lineage, including the Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Hospital. The nursing-training thread is taken up in ./school-of-nursing-history.md.

This prehistory left two marks still visible today. The first: in Hong Kong, a "teaching hospital" has never been property owned by a university. The pattern has always been church or charity runs the hospital, university borrows it for teaching — the later HKU–Hospital Authority relationship simply replayed that logic as "the public healthcare system runs the hospital, the university borrows it for teaching." The second: the Nethersole lineage runs unbroken to the present. The Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Hospital, originally on the Mid-Levels, saw its acute services taken over by the Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital (PYNEH), which opened in Chai Wan on 15 October 1993^※ — and PYNEH remains part of HKU's clinical teaching network today (see Section 4). Queen Mary's opening in 1937 simply moved a teaching line already fifty years old into a modern government acute general hospital.

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# 3. Queen Mary Hospital (玛丽医院)

# 3.1 Fact sheet

Queen Mary opened in 1937, replacing the former Government Civil Hospital as the island's main acute and accident hospital^※. It was extensively expanded in 1955 and 1983^※; the main ward block, K Block, stands 137 metres tall, making it one of the tallest hospital buildings in Asia^※, while the main building has been graded a Grade III historic building^※.

# 3.2 The "service, teaching, research" trinity

As the principal teaching hospital of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, Queen Mary provides training and research facilities for local and overseas postgraduate and undergraduate students^※. It is simultaneously Hong Kong's tertiary/quaternary referral centre for a range of complex and high-end services, which per the HA's hospital profile^※ include:

organ transplantation, bone marrow transplantation, neonatal intensive care, paediatric surgery, assisted reproduction, cardiothoracic surgery, oral and maxillofacial surgery with dental surgery, burn and reconstructive surgery, and neurosurgery^※.

Two of these "transplant hub" roles matter most:

• Liver transplantation: according to the HA's Queen Mary profile^※, Queen Mary has been Hong Kong's designated liver transplant centre since 2003 (the official wording says July 2003; some sources give November 2003 — both are noted). The world-class work of the Queen Mary liver transplant team (adult living-donor right-lobe liver transplantation, among others) is covered in ./departments-and-strengths.md.
• Heart transplantation: per HA materials^※, with the relocation of cardiothoracic surgery to Queen Mary in July 2008, the two hospitals have cared for heart-transplant patients jointly; long-term tertiary referral for heart transplantation has been centred on Grantham Hospital.

# 3.3 The cradle of organ transplantation in Hong Kong

Queen Mary's label as a "transplant hub" is no administrative fiat — it is the accumulated product of decades of clinical work, and several of Hong Kong's transplantation "firsts" happened here. According to official organ-donation material^※, the territory's first kidney transplant was performed at Queen Mary as early as 1969^※; in 2019 the transplant community marked "50 years of transplantation" from exactly that starting point. The Queen Mary surgical teams then pushed the field into the liver: per HKU's Department of Surgery^※, Hong Kong's first liver transplant was carried out at Queen Mary in October 1991^※, by the team of Fan Sheung-tat (范上达).

Liver transplantation has since become Queen Mary's signature service. According to the HA's liver transplant centre page for QMH^※, the centre has grown into one of the largest programmes of its kind in China and Southeast Asia; and it was on this foundation that Queen Mary was designated in 2003 the sole liver transplant centre in Hong Kong (officially July 2003; some sources say November — discrepancy noted). The team's best-known contribution is the adult living-donor right-lobe liver transplant, a procedure that rewrote the global surgical playbook — the people and the academic lineage behind that breakthrough are treated in ./departments-and-strengths.md.

Heart transplantation took a different route. Hong Kong's first heart transplant was done at Grantham Hospital in 1992^※, which long served as the tertiary referral hub; with the move of cardiothoracic surgery to Queen Mary in July 2008, the two hospitals have cared for heart-transplant patients jointly (see Section 4). One hospital carrying the liver and kidney transplant hubs together with a cardiothoracic base is the most concrete gloss on what "tertiary/quaternary referral" actually means.

# 3.4 A timeline of transplant "firsts"

Laid out side by side, the transplant milestones of Queen Mary and the wider Hong Kong West network show how the "cradle" grew, step by step. Years below are from the official and academic sources already cited:

Kidney in 1969, liver in 1991, heart in 1992 — of Hong Kong's three firsts in solid-organ transplantation, two fell at Queen Mary and one at Grantham in the same cluster. That is no coincidence; it is the outcome of a Hong Kong West network that has long concentrated complex surgery through referral and kept it tightly interlocked with university teaching and research. The people and academic lines behind the transplant teams (Fan Sheung-tat's adult living-donor right-lobe liver transplant, etc.) are covered in ./departments-and-strengths.md.

# 3.5 The "build while you demolish" redevelopment

A hospital that opened in 1937, with a main building graded as a historic structure, has finally reached its own major operation after nearly nine decades. According to the HA's Queen Mary redevelopment materials^※, the redevelopment is being phased, aiming to bring the facilities of the Hong Kong West flagship up to contemporary acute standards while keeping the whole hospital running without shutdown — a "build while you demolish, treat while you build" approach.

Phase 1, per the HA's capital works project pages^※, demolishes the old Clinical Pathology Building, University Pathology Building and the intern quarters, and constructs a new clinical block (Clinical Block 1, CB1) at the northern end of the campus^※, also adding a rooftop helipad for emergency use only, a footbridge linking the old and new buildings, and a dedicated ambulance entrance from Pok Fu Lam Road^※. According to published accounts of the works, the new CB1, around 26 storeys and 176 metres tall, was substantially completed in December 2024 and handed over to the HA in stages, with services coming into use in phases from late 2025^※. The reason for "build while you demolish" is that Queen Mary is the only public acute flagship on Hong Kong West — it has around 1,700 beds and runs at persistently high occupancy^※. Any shutdown would shove the pressure straight onto neighbouring networks, so the works can only proceed plot by plot, building by building, without ever emptying the hospital.

The redevelopment does not stop at Phase 1. Per the HA's redevelopment FAQ^※, the whole programme proceeds in phases: only once the Phase 1 block is up and the old buildings vacated can further demolition and later phases follow, progressively upgrading the entire estate to contemporary acute and teaching standards. For HKU the stakes of this once-in-a-century rebuild go beyond hardware: Queen Mary is the home ground for clinical training and internship placements for the Faculty's medical and dental students, and replacing the buildings means carrying the entire physical apparatus of bedside teaching, demonstration and specialist referral into the next generation.

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# 4. The network of Hospital Authority associate hospitals

Beyond Queen Mary, the Faculty of Medicine runs clinical services and bedside teaching in a number of Hospital Authority hospitals. According to the official pages of the clinical departments and the faculty-wide list on HKUMed's site^※, the principal associate hospitals are:

The list may look like a mere roll-call of hospitals, but behind it lies a Hong Kong West referral chain organised by specialty — and every single one of these institutions carries a history of nearly a century, some of more than a century. Each gets its own paragraph below.

# 4.1 Grantham Hospital: from a TB sanatorium to a cardiothoracic and transplant hub

Grantham is HKU's base for cardiothoracic surgery and heart transplantation, yet its origins have nothing to do with the heart. According to the HA's institutional history^※, Grantham Hospital was built at Wong Chuk Hang in 1957 by the Hong Kong Anti-Tuberculosis Association and named after the then-governor, Sir Alexander Grantham; it was the largest TB specialty hospital in the territory at the time^※, originally an extension of the Ruttonjee Sanatorium devoted to tuberculosis patients.

In the 1980s, with TB largely under control in Hong Kong, this "boutique hospital" completed a wholesale reinvention: per the same account, the hospital was progressively converted into a cardiopulmonary specialty hospital, fitted out with cardiac catheterisation laboratories, operating theatres and laboratories^※. The peak of that transformation was the two entries in the timeline above — the heart-transplant team was formed in 1991, performed Hong Kong's first heart transplant at Grantham in 1992, and followed with the territory's first single-lung transplant in 1995^※. Today Grantham is an HKUMed associate hospital offering clinical placements for medical students, and the base for cardiothoracic surgery, cardiology and paediatric cardiology^※; the cardiothoracic service of HKU's Department of Surgery operates jointly across Queen Mary and Grantham^※. A sanatorium built for TB became, half a century later, a powerhouse for HKU's cardiothoracic teaching and research — one of the most vivid cross-sections of Hong Kong's shifting disease profile.

# 4.2 Tung Wah Hospital: the city's oldest hospital, and one of its oldest teaching settings

Tung Wah has the longest pedigree on this list — it predates the University itself by nearly four decades. According to the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals' official history^※, Tung Wah Hospital was sanctioned under the Chinese Hospitals Ordinance in 1870, on a site at Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan, as the first Chinese hospital serving the Chinese community, providing free Chinese medical treatment and medicine for the sick poor^※, and opened in February 1872^※. Its founding grew out of a small shrine-temple, Kwong Fuk Yi Tsz, whose sheltering of the sick and weak had deteriorated into a public health scandal, finally prompting local Chinese merchants and gentry to pool funds and build a proper hospital — charity was in Tung Wah's DNA from day one.

That a benevolent institution founded on Chinese medicine is now a teaching setting for HKU's Western medicine is itself an epitome of Hong Kong's "East and West side by side" medical history. According to the relevant Wikipedia entry^※, Tung Wah is one of HKU's main teaching hospitals, with its Department of Medicine providing bedside teaching for medical and dental students^※. And the intersection between the Tung Wah Group's century-old charitable system and HKU is not a single point: Fung Yiu King Hospital, a Tung Wah group hospital at Pok Fu Lam, per one account began as the Sandy Bay Infirmary established in 1953, was renamed the Fung Yiu King Infirmary in 1987 after its donor, and was renamed again in 1994 as it shifted towards rehabilitation and convalescent care^※ — it is part of the Hong Kong West rehabilitation/convalescence associate network.

# 4.3 Tsan Yuk Hospital: from a maternity teaching hospital in Sai Ying Pun

Tsan Yuk carries HKU's clinical teaching in obstetrics and gynaecology, and its history reaches back to the same missionary era. According to one account, Tsan Yuk Hospital was opened by the London Missionary Society on 17 October 1922, originally on the corner of Western Street and Third Street in Sai Ying Pun, as a maternity hospital to meet the demand for obstetrics and newborn services, and to train midwives and obstetricians^※. The LMS appointed Alice D. Hickling, Hong Kong's first female foreign doctor, as superintendent; seeing that many local women were willing to be trained as professional midwives, she set up training in the hospital, and Tsan Yuk became one of Hong Kong's most important obstetric teaching hospitals^※ — the "maternity hospital + midwifery training" pairing, one more echo of the Alice Memorial's "hospital + medical school" logic.

The old Tsan Yuk premises on Western Street then earned a deferred honour. According to a government press release^※, the old Tsan Yuk Hospital main block was declared a statutory monument on 30 January 2026 under the Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance^※; per the Antiquities and Monuments Office^※ and the relevant entry^※, the building at 36A Western Street, Sai Ying Pun, bears witness to the beginnings of modern obstetrics and midwifery education in Hong Kong. Today's Tsan Yuk Hospital continues to provide clinical teaching for HKU obstetrics and gynaecology students as the Hong Kong West Cluster obstetric specialty hospital^※.

# 4.4 Duchess of Kent Children's Hospital: orthopaedic teaching and research born from spinal tuberculosis

The Duchess of Kent Children's Hospital at Sandy Bay on the south side of the island is a singular base for HKU's paediatric and orthopaedic clinical training. According to the Society for the Relief of Disabled Children^※, the hospital was founded by the Society in 1956 to care for children with orthopaedic conditions and scoliosis, beginning with just fifty beds, largely devoted to patients with tuberculosis of the spine^※; until 1971 it was known as the Sandy Bay Children's Convalescent Home^※.

Its bond with HKU lies in a world-class chapter of orthopaedic history. Per the Department of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine^※, the orthopaedic team from HKU's Department of Surgery works at the hospital and pioneered the breakthrough procedure for treating tuberculosis of the spine — the celebrated "Hodgson/Yau" surgical team^※; as Hong Kong's disease profile changed, the hospital's orthopaedic caseload shifted from TB and polio towards congenital and hereditary deformities^※. The Hospital Authority has managed the hospital's day-to-day operations since 1991, while the Society for the Relief of Disabled Children continues its support^※. As an HKUMed associate hospital, it offers paediatric clinical placements for medical students^※ — a clinical campaign against spinal tuberculosis that doubled as the birthplace of HKU orthopaedic teaching and research.

# 4.5 The HKU–Hospital Authority clinical relationship

Between the Faculty of Medicine and the Hospital Authority sits a "university–public healthcare system" partnership: the Authority provides the public hospitals' beds, patients and clinical facilities; HKU supplies the Faculty's teaching staff, disciplines and research-and-teaching framework. At Queen Mary and the associate hospitals listed above, many professors in the clinical departments hold dual appointments — a university post and an honorary/visiting consultant post with the Authority — teaching, seeing patients and doing research within the same public hospital. This "service, teaching, research in one" arrangement is the institutional bedrock of clinical education at Hong Kong's two medical schools: the Faculty does not itself own a public hospital, but turns public hospitals into teaching hospitals through cooperation with the HA.

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# 5. Gleneagles Hong Kong Hospital: a private teaching hospital

Outside the "public core" of HKU's clinical teaching sits one private supplement.

According to Gleneagles' own page on its partnership with HKU^※, Gleneagles Hong Kong is a full-scale teaching hospital offering clinical training for HKU medical students; the Faculty acts as its clinical partner, overseeing clinical governance and staff training. This gives HKU, alongside public Queen Mary, a private, elective, budgeted clinical teaching setting — formally mirroring CUHK's dual structure of "public Prince of Wales + private CUHK Medical Centre", though HKU's private arm is a joint venture with a commercial hospital group rather than a university-owned hospital.

Gleneagles' birth is itself a specimen of Hong Kong's "public–private partnership in healthcare" policy. Per the relevant Wikipedia entry^※, it is a joint venture between Singapore's Parkway Pantai and NWS Holdings, a Hong Kong-listed company; Parkway Pantai belongs to IHH Healthcare, one of Asia's largest private healthcare groups^※. The Wong Chuk Hang private hospital site, according to a Faculty press release^※, was awarded to GHK Hospital Limited by competitive tender in 2013^※ — the government granting the site by tender, requiring the operator to bring in an academic partner and submit to regulated charging, being the core conditions of the model. Construction followed, and the hospital opened on 21 March 2017 with about 500 beds^※.

For HKU, the arrangement plugs a structural gap in public teaching. Queen Mary is an acute general hospital: its case mix is dominated by emergencies and complex referrals, and its beds are chronically tight. Gleneagles, by contrast, is an appointment-based private tertiary hospital, giving medical students the other side of clinical life — "elective surgery, private-sector workflows, transparent pricing." The Faculty is responsible for clinical governance, professional standards and medical appointments, and trains the doctors, nurses and allied health professionals^※ — no equity, no capital, only academic standards and talent exported. The logic echoes HKU's arrangement in Shenzhen; the difference is that one partner is private and the other is across the border.

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# 6. University of Hong Kong–Shenzhen Hospital (2012)

The most unusual piece of HKU's clinical map lies outside Hong Kong — in Shenzhen.

# 6.1 "Hong Kong-style healthcare" goes to mainland China

The HKU–Shenzhen Hospital was born against the backdrop of the national healthcare reform China launched in 2009. According to one account, the Shenzhen government and HKU began talks in 2009, signed a cooperation agreement in July 2011, and the hospital opened on 1 July 2012^※. It was conceived as an experiment in transplanting the "Hong Kong model of medicine" into a mainland public hospital: per the relevant Wikipedia entry^※, the practices introduced included refusing red packets (hongbao) — the customary unofficial payments to doctors — a relatively conservative approach to medication and intravenous infusions, and an emphasis on evidence-based medicine over over-prescribing.

# 6.2 Early finances and positioning

According to the relevant Wikipedia entry^※, although the hospital initially received full government funding, it still ran "heavy losses" for a time; around 2014 there was a dispute over a "HK$200 million advance for clinical management and supervision", and from that year's subsidy arrangement the hospital moved into profit, with patient numbers then rising steadily. The hospital's first director was Grace Tang Wai-king (邓惠琼), succeeded in November 2016 by Lo Chung-mau (卢宠茂)^※.

This instalment covers only the HKU–Shenzhen Hospital's establishment, cost and bed profile as "HKU's out-of-territory teaching hospital". Its more heavily scrutinised second identity — as the "health-reform test bed" among mainland public hospitals, including "general practice first, then specialty", bundled payments, "cast-iron staffing without establishment posts and transparent pay", cross-border settlement of the Elderly Health Care Voucher, and its role as the first pilot site for the "Hong Kong and Macau Drug and Device Connect" scheme — and the debates around it, are treated in a dedicated article: ./hku-shenzhen-hospital-reform.md. This archive is a reference zone and records only what reliable sources establish; evaluative narratives about mainland healthcare policy are not developed here.

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# 7. Cross-references

• Origins of the teaching hospital: the Hong Kong College of Medicine (1887), the Alice Memorial Hospital and Sun Yat-sen: ./hong-kong-college-of-medicine-1887.md
• Faculty structure, the five schools, the MBBS curriculum: ./li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md
• Research strengths of each clinical department (liver transplantation, infectious disease, cardiology, etc.): ./departments-and-strengths.md
• The HKU–Shenzhen Hospital's "health-reform test bed" role (bundled payments, abolition of establishment posts, cross-border settlement): ./hku-shenzhen-hospital-reform.md
• The history of nurse training (the Nethersole-line nursing schools): ./school-of-nursing-history.md
• The Faculty of Dentistry and the Prince Philip Dental Hospital: ./faculty-of-dentistry.md
• The School of Public Health and the School of Chinese Medicine: ./school-of-public-health-and-chinese-medicine.md

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