Left to right: Tan Sri Dr Jeffrey Cheah, Founder and Chairman of Sunway Group; YB Datuk Seri Dr S. Subramaniam, Minister of Health, Malaysia; Professor Graeme Wilkinson, Vice-Chancellor of Sunway University; Robin Wheatley, Executive Director of Harvard Medical School Office of Global Education; Lau Beng Long, Managing Director of Sunway Group Healthcare Services; and Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, Director-General, Ministry of Health, Malaysia.
Sunway University, Sunway Medical Centre and Harvard Medical School have signed a tripartite agreement to provide a unique world-class training programme for healthcare leaders and working professionals throughout the Asia Pacific region.
The Harvard Medical School Southeast Asia Leadership Programme, (HMS SEAL), is designed to help healthcare leaders and frontline clinicians sharpen their skills on their quest to ensure the safest, most appropriate, and highest-quality standards of care in an increasingly complex healthcare ecosystem.
Minister of Health, YB Datuk Seri Dr S. Subramaniam; Director-General, Ministry of Health, Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah and; and Founder and Chairman of Sunway Group Tan Sri Dr Jeffrey Cheah, attended the signing of the tripartite agreement between Professor Graeme Wilkinson, Vice-Chancellor of Sunway University; Lau Beng Long, Managing Director of Sunway Group Healthcare Services; and Robin Wheatley, Executive Director of Harvard Medical School Office of Global Education.
Sunway University and Sunway Medical Centre have jointly committed RM1 million in scholarships to selected and qualified healthcare professionals out of the 100-participant intake per year.
“The 12-month programme, designed to be undertaken part-time, will be taught by leading academics from Harvard Medical School and supported by experts from Sunway,” said Tan Sri Dr. Jeffrey Cheah. “The programme aims to equip managers and clinicians working in the demanding healthcare industry, especially in major hospitals, with the know-how to become excellent leaders capable of achieving the highest quality standards in healthcare delivery. The partnership with Harvard Medical School will propel Sunway to be a regional healthcare hub and centre of excellence to benefit the professionals in this part of the world,”
The full programme will include three classroom workshops, online learning, and collaborative group work. The first two of the three workshops will take place in Sunway University and the final workshop will take place at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The Harvard Medical School campus will also host the graduation ceremony.
“We applaud the partnership as it will help develop our educators and healthcare professionals to become the best in their fields with insights from some of the best minds in the world. HMS SEAL will help raise the quality of healthcare professionals in this part of the world,” said YB Datuk Seri Dr S. Subramaniam.
“We are delighted to have the full-fledged support of the Sunway Group in launching this programme and their commitment to providing scholarships,” said Robin Wheatley, Executive Director of Harvard Medical School Office of Global Education. “Partnerships like this are very much in line with Harvard’s global mission. This programme will allow us to help healthcare leaders face the ever-growing challenges in the healthcare industry and elevate the standards of healthcare delivery. We are humbled by this opportunity.”
The programme will commence in early 2017 and will be locally managed by the new Sunway Institute for Healthcare Development at Sunway University, led by Professor Peh Suat Cheng, Special Adviser on Life Sciences Translational Research Development and Research Professor. She is also a Professor of Pathology.
“This collaboration builds on other links we have recently established with global leading universities such as Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. We firmly believe that by working with the top institutions in the world, we can bring leading global academics to Malaysia in order to augment the talent pipeline that Malaysia and Southeast Asia need- to be on par with the best in the world,” said Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah.
