Dr Ben Yuk-fai Fong, Associate Division Head of the Division of Science, Engineering and Health Studies at PolyU SPEED, developed an interest in Community Medicine from the very earliest days of his career. Since graduating from the University of Sydney over 30 years ago, Dr Fong has served in public, private, and university healthcare facilities in both Hong Kong and Sydney. Dr Fong has managed two local hospitals—Ruttonjee Hospital and Union hospital—and he was also the Deputy Medical Superintendent of the Prince Henry Hospital of the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Dr Fong’s volunteer work began while he was still Medical Superintendent at Ruttonjee Hospital. Joining the Auxiliary Medical Service (AMS) in 1995, Dr Fong put his many years of experience in medical administration to good use. The AMS is composed of over 4800 healthcare professionals and lay volunteers, all working together to provide paramedical support in times of emergency and first aid coverage for community events. As Senior Assistant Commissioner, Dr Fong played a crucial role in steering the development of the AMS towards providing more comprehensive and higher quality services. He helped set up the AMS Training Institute in 2000 and the First Aid Bicycle Team in 2002, as well as directing the medical support for large-scale events such as the Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon. Constantly striving for improvements, Dr Fong identified and addressed deficiencies in his team’s capabilities, and suggested everything from increasing first aid stations during marathons to providing first aid training for other uniformed services.

Despite the demands of his other responsibilities, Dr Fong dedicated a great deal of his time to the AMS, including their training, recruitment, field work, and public services. “Volunteering gives me another kind of satisfaction,” said Dr Fong, reflecting on his time in the AMS. When it comes to volunteering, Dr Fong advises that personal ambition and financial considerations should be kept out of the picture. “As a private practitioner, providing free first aid services is bad for business”, he quipped. In his opinion, trying to rise through the ranks of a volunteer organization is simply a distraction from contributing what you can to society, inviting stress instead of fulfilment.

When compared to his previous duties as head and Chief Executive of local hospitals, where he had to meet strict performance indicators as expected by the Board, Dr Fong found his volunteer work to be a pleasant change of pace. A community medicine specialist, Dr Fong brought with him a unique perspective. When his colleagues fretted about volunteers leaving the AMS soon after completing training, seeing it as a waste of resources, Dr Fong pointed out that the volunteers would carry the skills and knowledge they learned into the community, and that individuals with paramedical training are useful assets to society regardless of whether they are in the AMS. After all, they might one day save lives, if they happen to be in the right place at the right time. In cases like these, his ability to see the long-term benefit to the population reflects the mindset of an experienced community medicine practitioner.

In addition to serving the public through both his work and during his free time, Dr Fong also wants to make a change in society—to promote the concept of community health. With this in mind, he established the Hong Kong College of Community Health Practitioners (HKCCHP) in December 2017. His intention was not only to provide a platform for graduates to utilise their recently gained knowledge, but also to empower citizens with better health knowledge. During the 2019 outbreak of measles, members of the HKCCHP toured around the different districts of Hong Kong to give talks, hoping to raise awareness and educate the public regarding this highly contagious disease which had attracted wide media coverage and caused public fear.

Governmental directives and financial incentives are crucial to healthcare policy making, but ultimately healthcare is of the people, by the people, and for the people; thus, every stakeholder has a role to play in upholding community health. “Community health needs a more bottom-up approach, where everyone in society could take the initiative”, said Dr Fong. In 2003, Dr Fong helped to recruit local private general practitioners to visit and consult schools in Shatin, in line with the government’s “one school one doctor” policy. He also responded to the queries of readers of SkyPost and the Oriental Daily regarding the recent coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, proactively alleviating the concerns of many citizens.

Dr Fong believes that community health practitioners play an important role in case management. Such an idea was seeded when he was working at Prince Henry Hospital, where Nursing Consultants were responsible for managing day cases for endoscopic lithotripsy performed by urologists, allowing the doctors more time to concentrate on their own trade. With an ageing population in Hong Kong, the shortage of human resources in healthcare has become an increasingly pressing issue. If community health practitioners were recognised as an independent component of the healthcare workforce as case managers, the expanded healthcare team could provide more effective, individualised, and holistic patient care.

Dr Fong revealed his excitement after learning that Kwai Tsing District Health Centre had recently established a post for community health practitioners—the first of its kind in Hong Kong after many years of promotional effort. “Just as we did not have much subspecialty training in Hong Kong back when I first joined in 1985, now we are witnessing a revolution in health team reform,” he commented.

Working in public health is very different from treating individual patients. Dr Fong commented that one of the biggest takeaways from being a community medicine specialist is acquiring a wider perspective, “seeing the forest, not single trees”. Because community health and healthcare administration constantly deal with the big picture, Dr Fong advises that those who are interested should enjoy meeting people from different trades, be proactive in managing public provisions before problems occur, and persevere in community health interventions even though results might not be immediately apparent. Above all, he believes that serving the community requires commitment, devotion, and a good heart.

Professor Vincent Chung-tong Mok leads a research team at the Faculty of Medicine, Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) that conducts cutting-edge studies in Cerebral Small Vessel, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. He is a beloved teacher who has been elected Teacher of the Year seven consecutive times and one of the primary architects of the undergraduate medical education reform Global Physician Leadership Stream (GPS) programme in the Faculty. In his roles as a clinician, researcher, and educator, Prof Mok applies a patient-centred perspective, working in different capacities towards the common goal of alleviating and preventing suffering. His humanitarian spirit led to his collaboration with Medical Services International to provide health education to ethnic minorities in some of the most impoverished villages in mainland China, and a recent directorship for a training programme empowering social workers and other healthcare professionals to care for dementia patients and their caregivers in Hong Kong. His desire to serve has consistently guided his career decisions, his approach to patient care, and his research direction.

Professor Mok first became interested in neurology during his postgraduate training at the Prince of Wales Hospital. He noticed that the chronic nature of many neurological diseases requires the clinician to develop a strong and supportive long- term relationship with patients. He relished the opportunity to connect with patients, especially the older patients, whom he holds close to his heart. The analytical rigor demanded in the specialty also appealed to him. The combination of human connection, intellectual challenges, and the supportive senior specialists he met during his early career drew him towards neurology, which has since become his life’s work.

Today, Prof Mok regards research to be an integral part of his duties. However, earlier in his career he was so focused on developing his clinical skills and on clinical service that research did not cross his mind until after specialty training. His perspective on research changed when he witnessed his patients with various neurodegenerative diseases deteriorate before his eyes to the state where they became dependent on others for self-care, despite already receiving the best available treatments. After listening to patients voice their frustration and desperation when treatment options had been exhausted, Prof Mok resolved to help these patients and their families who struggled to maintain around-the-clock care. He understood to find a cure for these devastating neurological diseases, one needs to tease out the mechanisms underlying these diseases. Seven years ago, in partnership with another physician-neuroscientist, the team pioneered laboratory work focusing on untangling the complex mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease, which is the most common neurodegenerative disease. They later observed a strong link between microvascular dysfunction and Alzheimer’s disease. The team recently discovered that a drug for patients with diabetes could significantly reverse this microvascular dysfunction. This provides hope that disease progression might be slowed by tackling this microvascular dysfunction.

On the clinical side, in partnership with a computer engineer, his team has made leaps and bounds towards developing magnetic resonance imaging–based machine learning programmes for detecting early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. In future, this new technology may guide clinicians to select who should receive confirmatory investigation, such as positron emission tomography scan, for diagnosing early Alzheimer’s disease. When identified early, there is hope that prompt appropriate intervention can halt or slow the progress of irreversible dementia. Notably, in partnership with neurosurgeons, the team pioneered the use of deep brain stimulation for advanced Parkinson’s disease in Hong Kong two decades ago. Deep brain stimulation has now become a standard treatment in Hong Kong and has made dramatic improvements for many patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease.

In addition to patient care, Prof Mok has an active role in teaching the next generation of doctors. Under the GPS programme at CUHK, pioneered by Professor Justin Wu, Professor Simon Ng, and himself, students are encouraged to seek out research opportunities, take part in humanitarian service trips, and gain exposure to leadership training or hospital administration, subjects not usually covered in a conventional medical curriculum. Professor Mok encourages all medical students to take advantage of the relative leisure in undergraduate years to explore one’s strengths and develop interests before zooming into professional responsibilities. In other words, it is always best to be exposed early, but as we have learned from Prof Mok’s own journey, it is also never too late to begin. Professor Mok believes that each student is a “gold mine”, filled with different talents. He hopes this GPS platform can help to ‘dig out’ their talents for the benefit of the society in the long run.

As an accomplished clinician-researcher, Prof Mok would advise young professionals interested in research to do some soul-searching and discover their true motivation. He hopes that budding researchers realise that medical research should be conducted with the ultimate goal of bringing healing and protection to individuals and to the society, rather than for pursuit of recognition.

In addition to his career at CUHK and the Prince of Wales Hospital, Prof Mok also enjoys and encourages active participation in voluntary services. In 2003, he went on the first of a series of service trips to Yunnan in mainland China with Medical Services International. This first trip was in the wake of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic. Hong Kong doctors who worked through the SARS public health crisis became trained in infection control and were well equipped to fill in the gaps of knowledge in deprived regions. His first service trip was a truly eye-opening experience. He saw the strong need for health education which inspired him to return repeatedly over the next 12 years, leading teams of healthcare workers in training the village doctors and regional hospitals in areas of general medicine and neurology among ethnic minorities. The days were long and gruelling, but the joy of service outlasted any hardship and each trip became a lesson in the gift of giving.

Locally, Prof Mok, in partnership with a clinical psychologist and the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, has started a new training programme targeting social workers who serve dementia patients and their caregivers in community settings. Aptly named the GIFT programme (GIFT Care Professional Certificate Programme in Promoting Well-being in Informal Caregivers of Dementia), the programme aims to advise healthcare workers on how to promote psychological and physical well-being in caregivers of dementia patients. The first cohort of students entered the course in January 2019 and the third cohort started this year. With the ‘ageing tsunami’ on the horizon, Prof Mok anticipates that there will be more and more informal caregivers of dementia. These caregivers are commonly the patients’ spouses or children. Many will likely experience significant stress and feelings of helplessness and he hopes that this programme will become a “GIFT” to these informal caregivers who give selflessly to their loved ones suffering from dementia.

Reflecting on the past 20 years in medicine, patient stories stood out as the most rewarding moments in his career. He remembers a young man in his mid- twenties who was his youngest case of Parkinson’s disease. Professor Mok experienced a mix of emotions regarding this case: partly disbelief, and partly saddened by the many challenges this patient will be facing, from employment to social relationships, to even self-care in the long term. Professor Mok encouraged this patient to connect with other patients with Parkinson’s disease for mutual support. Over the years, this patient eventually managed to start a support group for other young patients with early-onset Parkinson’s disease who were facing similar crisis and challenges in life. Encouraged by his serving heart, in 2013, Prof Mok nominated this young patient for a Top Ten Regeneration Warriors award and eventually this patient became the first patient with Parkinson’s disease to receive this award.

“My life difficulties are nothing compared to that faced by my patient, yet even when faced with such health challenges he still has the heart and strength to help others. I am truly inspired by him. Indeed, I consider this young patient and many of my patients, as well as their dedicated caregivers, my ‘teachers of life’. I am really blessed through serving them,” reflected Prof Mok. He also remembers being pulled aside suddenly by a man he did not recognise at the hospital 2 years ago. It emerged that he was the son of a patient under Prof Mok’s care for few years who had recently passed away. He had recognised Prof Mok and expressed his heartfelt gratitude to him for looking after his mother throughout her illness. Although he does not work for recognition, Prof Mok shared that these moments he feels are reward enough.

To this day, Prof Mok always ends a consultation with the question: “Is there anything else that I may help you with?” inviting patients to discuss their thoughts and worries with him. Staying true to his course to alleviate and prevent suffering, his passion to serve has formed the foundation for his success and has surely impacted countless patients positively in more ways than he can count. To conclude, Prof Mok reiterated the most valuable lesson that he has learned: it is truly more blessed to give than to receive.

One afternoon in October 2019, Dr Chi-wai Chan returned to the United Christian Hospital, where he was the former Chief of Service in the Department of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, to share his experience of volunteering around the globe. Now working part-time, he looked back on his career as a doctor and carer for all those in pain and agony.

In 1996, Dr Chan began his service in mainland China. Although he had acquired a relatively comfortable life in Hong Kong, he wanted to go to the mainland and help fellow Chinese people—the roots are the same despite differences. As a long-time Christian, he was also motivated by the values of love and sharing, which led him to his starting point, Henan, where there had been a flood in 1991. Since then, he has visited more of mainland China, Kenya, Africa, Madagascar, Iraq, and many other places.

On some of his travels, Dr Chan was able to treat patients with his professional skills; on others he had more time to connect and communicate with the local people. Natural disasters and wars result in prevalent bone fractures, and Dr Chan’s specialism in orthopaedics and traumatology is invaluable in such situations. He was a volunteer that provided assistance immediately after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. At a town a couple of hours away from the centre of Sichuan Province, where the hospital had been demolished by the shaking, he encountered a person with a bone fracture. Usually, X-ray examination is needed to precisely locate the site of the injury, but his search for working equipment was in vain. Amidst these difficult circumstances, Dr Chan, relying only on his expertise and keen senses, set the fractured bones. Dr Chan also witnessed first-hand shortages of resources in some less-developed regions or destroyed sites. In one surgical scene, he saw blood-soaked gauze being washed and reapplied to the wound of the patient on the operating table. These nerve-wrecking stories were real challenges for Dr Chan that one can only imagine and hope they turned out well.

Among his many trips to Sichuan after the earthquake, the first trip involved a great deal of providing spiritual support, Dr Chan recalls. Six days after the disaster, the most severely injured had already been taken by ambulances to hospitals in other major cities or provinces, so there was not much to do as a doctor. Therefore, Dr Chan took up the role of an educator, teaching children there how to count to one hundred in English. He also communicated with the villagers there—their lifestyle was free and tailor-made for whatever they needed on the field.

Despite his utmost efforts, Dr Chan still felt helplessness in some situations, such as dealing with the sorrow of the survivors. He particularly remembers that one 6-year-old wrote ‘I want to see my brother,’ on a wish-making balloon. Sadly, it was already 2 weeks after the earthquake, and impossible for the child to realise that wish.

Having been retired for almost 3 years, Dr Chan has witnessed some of his old classmates enjoying fame and fortune. Nonetheless, his belief that money cannot buy true happiness has never been shattered. The Christian proverb ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive’ is imprinted on his heart, and he deeply believes that this is the only way to live a happy and contented life. If he had the chance to choose his path of life again, he says he would live the same life again with no regrets. With thrill and excitement on his face, Dr Chan was eager to share pictures of patients he revisited years after he had performed surgery on in Luoyang. In 1997, Dr Chan was heartbroken when he saw a 9-year-old girl with polio crawling across the floor like an animal owing to her weak lower limbs and back. Despite not being able to completely cure the disease, he greatly improved her ability to stand and walk by operating to straighten the hips and knees and then giving her braces. When Dr Chan revisited her almost 20 years later, she was able to work, get married and take care of herself and her children. She had regained independence and more importantly, she could finally live like a dignified human being with a spouse and family. Dr Chan and his team received a very warm welcome from her family with every moment of their meeting filled with immense gratitude. There is nothing more enjoyable for Dr Chan to see how a surgery completely changes the life of a person and even the fate of a family.

Despite having travelled for almost a hundred missions, Dr Chan has no plans to stop. His next destination is Niger in December 2019. He wishes to visit the more difficult and challenging places while he is still physically capable of travelling. Having just visited one of the most infamous war-torn places in the world, Iraq, he also has plans for next year to visit Gabon, which is a severely deprived country in Africa. These are places where few volunteers choose to go, thus are with greater needs that Dr Chan wants to address. ‘If you are willing to go to places where nobody else dares, your presence will make a difference’, he said as he explained the reasons behind choosing the countries or regions to serve.

Inside every doctor should bear a compassionate heart. Inside every volunteer is an adventurous soul that wants to understand and experience the adventures of other places and people. The decision comes down the value one holds, treasures and believes in. Dr Chan has both of those, making his determination to change the lives of the underprivileged miles away from Hong Kong unstoppable.

Professor Frances Kam-yuet Wong’s warm smile and friendliness were what first caught our attention. Bringing along some cinnamon tea she bought from the United States, she openly offered to make us tea, as she guided us through her life story of working beyond the call of her duty as a nursing profession. Charged with a passion to serve the community Prof Wong, President of the Hong Kong Academy of Nursing (HKAN), described her determination to embark on a journey to lobby for better patient care through advocating for policy changes and leading spear-headed changes to introduce multidisciplinary care into the Hong Kong community. Hers is a story that echoes her belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The humanitarian aspect of medical care touched her heart. After graduation and assuming the role of a registered nurse, Prof Wong had a renewed sense to directly touch the lives of others. This motivated her to spend her weekends visiting refugee camps in Kowloon City. By helping in the clinics, she was able to provide valuable help that these clinics depended on by assisting in essential procedures that were in heavy demand. With a motivation to lend a helping hand wherever it was welcomed, she also regularly visited children with intellectual disabilities. Prof Wong recounts a particularly memorable time during her time as a young nurse when she was able to share a unique and deep bond with her long-term patients in the intensive care and renal wards. With in-depth conversations made with every decision, a naturally close rapport was built between them. She was deeply touched when she was invited to the funerals of her dear patients.

Unlike their medical counterparts, nursing specialists in Hong Kong previously did not have any registries or accreditation systems. That began to change in October 2011, when HKAN was established, with the aim to strive for regulation of advanced nursing practice and to accredit nurse specialists on par with international standards. Prof Wong played a pivotal role in the establishment of the HKAN, and her mission now is to achieve statutory status and gain legal protection for nurse specialists in Hong Kong so that the public is protected by safe professional practice. Prof Wong’s diverse background and extensive clinical experience guide her to lead the fight for the rights of nurses. Prof Wong is a key player in HKAN’s efforts to regulate advanced nursing practice. In large part as a result of her efforts, numerous nurses in mainland China have received an internationally recognised accreditation status, and it is hoped that this system can achieve statutory status in Hong Kong. This system would provide legal protection for specialist nurses and enhance healthcare services provided to the community by ensuring that safe, professional nursing care is provided to all patients. Not only does Prof Wong approach her daily work with an incredible amount of passion, she has also always taken the initiative to go the extra mile for example by working with the underprivileged on her days off during her time as a practising nurse, and more recently through lobbying and advocacy for policy changes that will improve patient care. Prof Wong serves as an exemplary model of how healthcare professionals should approach their work.

“Hong Kong has medical services but not healthcare services.” These words from an American professor gave Prof Wong pause for thought. During her research in transitional care from hospital to community, Prof Wong realised that the inadequacy of post-discharge community healthcare leads to high readmission rates and increases the burden of Hong Kong’s healthcare system. This led her to the idea of community-based health centres, which consist of interdisciplinary healthcare professionals such as nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and counsellors. Together, the team help to solve underlying social problems that contribute to health problems, so that the public can receive community-based support. The government-funded pioneer district health centre will be established in Kwai Tsing district, with hopes to enhance the public’s awareness of disease prevention and to provide support for the chronically ill. As a member of the Steering Committees on Primary Healthcare Development and Prevention and Control of Non-communicable Diseases, Prof Wong envisions the progressive participation of other districts and the involvement of the whole Hong Kong population. She hopes that ultimately, more and more citizens will take an active role to manage their own health instead of solely relying on healthcare professionals.

Prof Wong describes nursing as a calling, saying, “I did not choose nursing, but nursing chose me”. Since the early days of her career, when she decided to pursue nursing instead of a Sociology degree, Prof Wong has always found the job to be incredibly rewarding. She feels privileged to be trusted by patients and is grateful for the opportunity to accompany them on their journeys. This immense job satisfaction drives Prof Wong to further her career as a nurse, and also to advance the profession as a whole. Along the way, she has met many inspirational figures, whose passion for the profession and for the care of patients she greatly admires. They include professors who taught her in nursing school and numerous members of the HKAN.

To draw our interview to a conclusion, Prof Wong offered a few words of advice for both healthcare providers and the public. To healthcare professionals, she says, “Follow your passions, as this will be better for both yourself and your patients.” In general terms, she also advises everyone to, “Take more responsibility for your own health, and remember to practice self-care.”

Professor Chetwyn Chan is a pioneer in his field—one of the first to integrate academia with the community. Driven by his strong belief that academia should pivot on the wider community, his research efforts revamp the traditional concept of rehabilitation, firmly establishing rehabilitative community services as an integral component of modern healthcare.

A distinguished figure in the community, Prof Chan serves diversified leadership roles in both administration and academia. He is presently the Associate Vice President (Learning and Teaching), Chair Professor of Rehabilitation Sciences, and Director of the University Research Facility in Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Outside of his official duties, he is perhaps more well-recognised within the community as the Vice-Chairman of the Executive Committee of The Hong Kong Society for Rehabilitation (HKSR).

“I don’t believe academia is limited to only research,” Professor Chan asserts. “Academia must not neglect social needs.” It appears that few university graduates actively participate in Hong Kong society, and he considers this a pitfall of the tertiary education system. Unwilling to fall into this trap, he takes a further step, using PolyU as a cradle for knowledge transfer.

After 3 years of clinical practice as an occupational therapist, Professor Chan pursued a PhD in Educational Psychology. He then became a scholar and researcher at PolyU and invested his efforts in psychology and rehabilitation sciences. One of his main research areas is post-stroke rehabilitation; an interest driven by a vision of creating a paradigm shift in the community of stroke patients: from engaging in activities of daily living to autonomous and independent living.

“Things don’t happen easily with a mere desire to take an extra step”, Professor Chan concedes, “it is important to choose to do something that society truly needs and is willing to receive.” His interest in helping disabled individuals coincided with an unmet gap between post-stroke patients being discharged from hospital and their leading a meaningful and productive life. Rehabilitation services were often delayed, offered long after discharge from hospital, and the services themselves were limited to the bare essentials. Aside from the institutional shortcoming, there was a lack of patient awareness. Post-stroke patients seemed to be led to believe that the basic services provided by the Hospital Authority were adequate, and they were unaware of needs- and community-based rehabilitation services that are crucial to attain the goal of independent living. For instance, vocational rehabilitation is pivotal in enabling young post-stroke patients to regain a worker role in the family. Activity and participation have become the cornerstones of the contemporary rehabilitation recommended by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF); however, the Hospital Authority and post-stroke patients appeared unmotivated to fund or purchase such services. There was a profound need to develop rehabilitation services in conjunction with official healthcare services.

The field of rehabilitation has evolved greatly over the past 30 years. In the past, it was little more than an afterthought. In an ageing population and with younger onset of some chronic illnesses, rehabilitation has developed into an integral part of the patient healthcare journey.

Current stroke rehabilitation services provided at the Hospital Authority focus on conventional skills training, helping patients regain their ability to perform activities of daily living through repeated practice. However, when patients are exposed to a different scenario in the community, it is difficult for them to turn their training into actual coping skills. To tackle this challenge, Professor Chan, with his doctoral students, constructed the first self-regulated learning protocol. The value of this protocol in helping post-stroke patients to regain lost daily activity skills has been validated in a series of randomised controlled trials. This day-to-day intervention protocol consists of a three-stage training programme based on cognitive neuroscience knowledge-task chunking, self-referenced appraisal, and mental rehearsal. Self-regulated learning allows patients to be more aware of their strengths (abilities) and weaknesses (disabilities), so they can address new scenarios through integration and synergy of skills they have learned or regained. This, as noted by Professor Chan, is a good demonstration of pushing the limit of the patients’ frontal cortex to produce the executive functions necessary for achieving independent living in the community.

Using his knowledge of self-regulated learning and the ICF model, Professor Chan established comprehensive rehabilitation services for post-stroke patients in the HKSR. Professor Chan found that this was as a great platform to bridge the divisions between academia and community, as well as his interests to find solutions for addressing patients’ needs in the community. The HKSR wholeheartedly embraces the mission of providing community-based rehabilitative services for patients with chronic diseases. Patients who have suffered from stroke are one of the core groups benefitting from its services. The new service focuses on the activity and participation needs of post-stroke patients and, in particular, their return to work and community living. With this service and the self-regulated learning strategy, post-stroke patients benefit from a greater capability to work and live independently, as well as contribute (rather than be a burden) to the well-being of their families and communities.

By taking many carefully considered extra steps, Professor Chan is transforming the post-stroke rehabilitation services that were once an afterthought into a full-fledged framework with holistic care. However, patient awareness of the new services is still lacking, and rehabilitation services remain disconnected from hospitals. Professor Chan continues to work hard, hoping to generate sufficient evidence and impact with the new services, so that the government will adopt the new service model into the health system. Professor Chan hopes, one day, to see hospital- and community-based rehabilitation services in parallel, as a cohesive whole.