The body that regulates specialist doctors on Monday said it would try to encourage more medics to serve as medical witnesses to support proposed reforms to the Medical Council.

The government had earlier invited the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine (HKAM) to set up a specialist talent pool to speed up the obtaining of expert reports for handling complaints and inquiries.

Speaking at a spring reception for the media, HKAM’s president, Philip Li, said around 400 doctors had joined its training course on becoming medical expert witnesses since 2022.

Li said about 170 doctors went through the full course, adding the academy was exploring ways to boost participation and completion.

“They need to know this is part of their social responsibility for the whole society to become a specialist as a medical witness for the system,” he said.

“At the same time, we are looking into incentives, for example, when they participate in the course, they will be given continuous medical education points, or when they even participate in the medical witness, they would be given such points as well.”

Currently, around 580 out of some 9,900 doctors across 74 specialities have joined the expert witness pool under the HKAM.

Li acknowledged that specialists face heavy workloads and sometimes feel their efforts in handling cases receive insufficient recognition.

“This may not be easy to address, so enhancing the medical expert witness pool is only one factor,” he said, adding that it was difficult to quantify how increasing the number of medical witnesses improves the overall timing for each proceeding.

On a separate note, the academy has drafted a position statement that aims to formulate a clear blueprint for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical education.

The document will be published in the Hong Kong Medical Journal in the first half of the year.

The academy is also developing an AI-powered virtual patient consultation platform for its specialist training programmes, which will first roll out in emergency medicine and family medicine later this year.

Clement Tham, vice-president of education and examinations, said it was important for doctors to adopt AI tools, but only as an assistance.

“We do not want our future doctors to be de-skilled by the over-reliance on artificial intelligence," he said.

"That's why we have been repeatedly emphasising the importance of training our future generations of doctors to be able to make independent professional judgements and diagnosis, and also to independently conduct their clinical practice.”


Edited by Tony Sabine