The Faculty of Medicine
The first MBBS program in Macau
The Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) launched the first, and only, Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) program in September 2019, in Macau S.A.R. This marks the first time a local higher education institution will take on the responsibility for training “Tomorrow’s Doctors” for Macau S.A.R.
Together with the Center for Excellence in Medical Education, and the Center for Continuing Medical and Health Education, the Faculty of Medicine will continue the pioneering, development and modernization of Macau’s health-care training, led by Professor Manson Fok, Dean of the Faculty.
Signing ceremony between MUST and Zhuhai Municipal Government appointing Zhuhai Municipal People's Hospital as MUST Faculty of Medicine First Affiliated Hospital.
On 27th March 2021, the Faculty of Medicine signed an agreement with the Zhuhai Municipal Government to appoint the Zhuhai Municipal People’s Hospital as the First Affiliated Hospital for the MUST Faculty of Medicine, enhancing our clinical teaching capacity.
The Faculty of Medicine also offer the Bachelor Degree of Food and Nutritional Science, and postgraduate programs including: Doctoral Degree of Public Health, Master Degree of Public Health and Master Degree of Nursing.
The centers of excellence in medical education
The Faculty of Medicine Training Center contains state-of-the-art medical simulation training equipment for continued medical education.
The Faculty has established the Center of Excellence in Medical Education and the Center for Continuing Medical and Health Education, to take the lead in top quality undergraduate medical training and continued medical education, with the aim of improving healthcare provision in Macau. These Centers have been conducting clinical practice skills training since 2011. Over 3,500 healthcare providers have been trained, including 800 medical specialists, 1,200 frontline doctors and 1,500 nursing staff.
Our Centers of Excellence will take on a central role in our MBBS curriculum.
These Centers house state-of-the-art virtual reality manikin-based system and innovative software tools. The scope of study covers Critical Care Medicine, Cardiology, Cardiothoracic Surgery, Neurosurgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Pediatrics, Radiology, Gastroenterology, Orthopedics, Urology, General surgery and Anatomy. Through a series of medical academic courses, we provide high quality healthcare simulation training in Macau, and will therefore promote the highest standards of excellence and professionalism and enable patients to receive better medical services.
Our centers of excellence will also take on the central role of delivering many of the clinical skills aspects of medical training in our MBBS program, and complement traditional teaching methods to allow our medical students to improve skills, teamwork, communication and safety.
Our curriculum and teaching achievements
Our MBBS program is six years long, with the aim of developing “Tomorrow’s Doctors” who are compassionate, caring and competent in the delivery of effective and efficient patient care to people of Macau and the rest of the world. Our curriculum structure is summarized in the following table.
Our MBBS curriculum.
In the first two years of our curriculum the traditional basic science disciplines (such as anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology, microbiology, pharmacology) are integrated. Our students are exposed to clinical sciences even in their first year, to show how basic sciences can be applied in a clinical context. Throughout our MBBS curriculum, active learning is emphasized. In team-based learning classes, students work in teams to tackle authentic clinical problems. In practical classes, students collaborate with, and sometimes even teach one another, in completing tasks that lead to discovery of new knowledge. In lectures, students are often engaged in activities that stimulate their thinking, especially in the application of what they are learning in clinical situations.
Driven by social distancing and local-regional lockdowns since January 2020, we successfully adapted our curriculum delivery for our students to continue their MBBS program online, and achieved very favorable student feedbacks. We have also adapted our practical sessions, key to our curriculum, to be delivered online. An example is our approach of delivering our spirometry practical over Zoom. We first demonstrated the spirometry procedure over Zoom, allowing the students to understand the methods, and also to consolidate their knowledge on respiratory physiology. This was followed by an interactive data analysis where the students could directly, and remotely, control the teacher’s computer. This gave the students hands-on appreciation and handling of spirometry data, guided by teachers without needing to be on campus. This novel method of practical delivery has been published in the journal Advances in Physiology Education. Teachers from our Faculty are also very active in the medical education field, publishing articles and books which cover various aspects of medical education.
Our research
Our Faculty members are active researchers and produce impactful scientific and medical research. Our research covers a wide range of topics, from Covid-19 research to diabetes, cancer and neuroscience.
Publications from Chair Professor Zhang Zang's laboratory in the development of COVID-19 vaccines and novel AI-assisted diagnostic approaches for COVID-19 pneumonia.
The highlight of our growing research activity and impact is our work in the global fight against COVID-19. In 2020, our Faculty (in collaboration with others) has developed a recombinant vaccine against the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, which impairs the ability of the virus to infect human cells. This study, published in the journal Nature, has attracted substantial media attention. In 2021, our faculty is also involved in a study which developed a fully automated artificial intelligence mediated deep-learning pipeline for assessing chest X-rays to identify COVID-19 and also determine its severity.
Other notable research output from our Faculty include:
- The signaling pathways in pathological lens growth.
- Identification of genetic risk factors for cardiovascular complications in diabetes.
- A large genome-wide association study of over 400k East Asians to identify over 180 genetic locations associated with Type 2 diabetes.
- Development of prophylactic compounds to prevent SARS-CoV2 infection.
- The role of endothelin-1 in neuropathic pain and stroke.
- Characteristics of SARS-CoV2 infection in children.
- Seroprevalence of IgM and IgG antibodies against SARS-CoV2 in China.
- The efficacy and safety of add on therapies in patients given statins.
We recognize the importance of academic research excellence in the development of our Faculty. As we continue forward delivering high quality medical education in the only MBBS programme in Macau, plans are already in place to establish a state-of-the-art Centre for Biomedical Innovations to drive our ambitions in academic excellence.
