I became Fellow of the Hong Kong College of Cardiology (HKCC) in 1992, the year when she was founded. It is really my privilege to have been serving in the College Council since 2000. In the past 29 years, I have the chance to witness the great work and tremendous achievement of our past Presidents and Council Members. As the College marches into the 30th anniversary next year, it is indeed my great honour, pleasure, and “pressure” to serve as the President of this successful and fantastic organization.
The top missions of the College to promote the highest standard of cardiovascular patient care and heart health of people of Hong Kong have been well achieved in the past through our well-received professional scientific education such as Annual Scientific Congress, the Core Cardiology Course and the various seminars and courses of our different subspecialty Chapters, and our public cardiovascular health education including our recently launched Heart Health Channel and the HKCC mobile app.
Yet, challenges do lie ahead as our College enters her 30th anniversary. The Covid-19 pandemic made it difficult for our physical professional educational meetings to take place and many of these had to change to zoom or webinar format, with its own limitations. We are still finding an optimal way to organize these professional meetings. Maybe some sort of hybrid format is the way to go though it will be more technically demanding and costly. For public cardiovascular health education, there are actually a lot of information out there in the Internet, media and nearly everywhere. Some of them are good but some unreliable. We need to find better means to disseminate more widely and effectively our College’s accurate and authoritative cardiovascular health information to the public, and hope more and more people will adopt the healthy life style we always advocate.
Up till now, our College only admits doctors as members. As allied cardiovascular health professionals play a more and more important role in different cardiology subspecialties such as cardiac rehabilitation, heart failure and cardiovascular intervention, we are looking into recruiting allied cardiovascular health professionals as members as well. In fact, their attendance in our past scientific meetings was remarkable. I am sure their expert contribution will definitely help the College development. I guess all of you are aware of our college journal, Journal of Hong Kong College of Cardiology. We are working on its further enhancement with a view to making it an indexed journal in the years to come. It is certainly a challenging task and your support is of paramount importance.
Last but not the least, we will continue to find more effective and convenient ways to engage our Fellows and Members since they are our biggest assets. We understand that many of them are very busy. The HKCC mobile app is one of the means by which we hope to improve our connection. Soliciting our valuable Fellows and Members’ contribution is certainly vital to achieving the College’s missions.
The great work done by our predecessors have definitely laid down a solid foundation for us to build on. Our team of Council Members will neither be complacent with the past achievements nor be overwhelmed by the “pressure” of the challenges ahead. We are committed to try our best to help our College grow even better and stronger, and together let’s embrace our future with hope, confidence and energy.
Dr. Chan Wai Kwong, Andy
President
16 September 2021
