Hong Kong’s first traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) hospital aims to co-develop the world’s first clinical database on interactions between its healing practices and Western treatments to help provide evidence-based therapy guidelines.

Dr Cheung Wai-lun, project director of the Health Bureau’s Chinese Medicine Hospital Project Office, said on Sunday that no such database currently existed and he hoped the launch of the institute would help to fill that gap.

The Chinese Medicine Hospital of Hong Kong will open on December 11 and is intended to showcase TCM’s capabilities and to help train potential practitioners among the international community.

“When we are integrating Chinese and Western medicine, it remains a question whether the combination of the two kinds of medicines would lead to side effects. It would be problematic if we did not have such information,” he said.

“Hong Kong will work on co-developing a database on this front with other regions and countries.”

Such research outcomes would ensure the medical community had a better understanding of how the two sides could collaborate to deliver the best outcomes, Cheung said.

“Under what conditions would Western medicine perform better, or would it be better to see Western doctors first? Under what conditions would it be better to see a Chinese medicine practitioner first? These questions will need to be addressed by research,” he said.

The institution is situated on Tseung Kwan O’s Pak Shing Kok Road and will be the city’s first hospital dedicated to Chinese remedies, offering both pure TCM treatments and some combined with Western medicine.

Dr Cheung Wai-lun, project director of the Health Bureau’s Chinese Medicine Hospital Project Office, has said the facility has been tasked with promoting TCM overseas and integrating it into Western medicine-dominant medical systems. Photo: Eugene Lee

In the first year of operation, the hospital will provide general outpatient consultation, specialist clinics and day hospitalisation services, while residents can choose between government-subsidised services and those priced at market rates.

The hospital will also serve as a teaching and research hub for Chinese medicine schools at three local universities – the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Baptist University.

Cheung said the facility had also been tasked with promoting TCM overseas and integrating it into Western medicine-dominant medical systems.

The hospital would regularly invite local, mainland Chinese and international experts to offer training or conduct research, he said.

The move would make Hong Kong a convenient location for members of the international medical community to witness the capabilities of TCM treatments, he said.

“We will develop many international training courses,” he said. “Hong Kong could become an international hub for [TCM] training.”

Cheung said there was currently a lack of understanding between Chinese and Western medical specialists, and that the world was waiting for a collaborative model.

Foreign practitioners could integrate TCM into medical systems back home if they witnessed first-hand how Chinese and Western treatments could interact, he said.

On the research front, Cheung also hoped that experts at the hospital could work with researchers in other regions to conduct multinational TCM application studies, so as to obtain larger and more diverse research samples.

“In this case, the coverage will be wider and the data will be more reliable, while the results will be widely recognised,” he said.