The Past Life of CityU’s Veterinary Medical Centre (VMC)—From Peace Avenue Veterinary Clinic to Southeast Asia’s Largest Veterinary Centre

This article belongs to Module 11 "Medicine/Hospital" of the City University of Hong Kong Unofficial History Archive. This piece does not rehash the acquisition timeline itself—for the year-by-year narrative of the 1984 founding, 2016 acquisition, and 2019 relocation and expansion, see the companion piece veterinary-college-3.md; for the current site’s facilities, specialties, and diagnostic laboratories, see veterinary-college-2.md; for the establishment and accreditation of the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC), see veterinary-college.md.

This piece fills in a different set of questions: how does a publicly funded university "buy" and operate a pet hospital open to the public? Who makes the decisions in the boardroom, what are the consultation fees, and how does it balance serving the public with teaching? And why did the choice of a Sham Shui Po location provoke opposition from neighbours? Facts with years/figures are cited in situ; where disputes arise, multiple perspectives are presented side-by-side without adjudication, with the strength of the source noted.

One-sentence conclusion: CityU’s Veterinary Medical Centre (VMC) is not directly run by a university department, but is operated by CityU Veterinary Health Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University. It moved into Trinity Towers in Sham Shui Po in 2019^※, spans roughly 33,000 square feet, and is one of the largest veterinary teaching hospitals in Southeast Asia that is open for public appointments while maintaining its old consultation fees.

---

One afternoon in October 2016, representatives of the Owners' Corporation of Trinity Towers, a residential estate in Sham Shui Po, were invited to CityU and given a piece of news they had not anticipated: the entire shopping arcade sitting empty beneath their flats was to be turned into an animal clinic operating 24 hours a day, on a scale comparable to a hospital. According to an account relayed by the independent media outlet Radical HK^※, the corporation raised objections on the spot—the sales brochure had stated the space was for "shops", yet what was coming was an animal hospital. Almost concurrently, three months prior, CityU had just completed an acquisition in Mong Kok: it had bought out Hong Kong's very first clinic established by a local veterinarian. These two threads converged in Sham Shui Po, forming the least-told aspect of the VMC’s "past life"—not the glamour of the college, but the mundane realities a university must resolve before really opening a public hospital: "who will run it, what will it charge, and where will it be located?"

# Who founded Peace Avenue Veterinary Clinic? The cachet of "the first local veterinary clinic"

To understand why CityU had its eye on it, one must first know what was being acquired. Peace Avenue Veterinary Clinic (PAVC) was founded in 1984^※ on Peace Avenue in Mong Kok, and was the first veterinary clinic in Hong Kong founded by a locally-born veterinarian. The founder, Dr. Phillip C.K. Mak, earned his Bachelor of Veterinary Science (BVSc) from the University of Sydney in 1983^※ and started the practice immediately upon returning to Hong Kong in 1984. He later went on to earn a Master's degree in veterinary surgery from Murdoch University in 1996.

The weight of this reputation rests on the word "local". Before the 1980s, pet healthcare in Hong Kong was almost entirely dominated by foreign-trained expatriate veterinarians; a clinic founded and continuously run by a local practitioner for over thirty years was a rarity in the industry. Some local pet media have likened it to the "Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital of the pet world"—such colloquial comparisons are difficult to quantify, and this archive cites them only as circumstantial evidence of the clinic's standing in the sector, not as a verifiable fact.

What truly elevated this community clinic into a "referral-level" centre were three verifiable technological upgrades: in 2001, it was designated a training centre by the Veterinary Surgeons Board of Hong Kong^※, beginning to provide pre-registration on-the-job training for newly graduated vets; in 2004, it installed Hong Kong's first pet-dedicated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine^※ and simultaneously launched a 24-hour specialist emergency and hospitalisation service; in 2008, it relocated to Liberty Avenue in Ho Man Tin, expanding its floor area to 18,000 square feet^※. The significance of these three steps will become apparent in the next section—what CityU was buying was not a piece of land, but a clinical and training system that had already been running for three decades. For a full timeline of these milestones, see veterinary-college-3.md; this article will not lay them out one by one.

# Why would a publicly funded university "buy" a pet clinic instead of building its own?

CityU partnered with Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine in the US to establish its veterinary school in March 2014^※ (initially named the School of Veterinary Medicine). For its flagship six-year Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM) programme to achieve international accreditation, one of the hard prerequisites is that students must complete a substantial number of case rotations in a genuine clinical environment. This led to an unavoidable choice: build a teaching hospital from scratch, or acquire an existing one?

CityU chose the latter, and the logic is not difficult to grasp. Building from scratch would mean starting from zero in terms of licences, premises, equipment, clients, and caseload, whereas the very thing accrediting bodies scrutinise is whether there is a "sufficient volume of real cases". Acquiring a clinic that had been operating for thirty years, with a training centre pedigree, an MRI machine, a specialist system, and a stable clientele, was essentially buying up the four elements of "facilities + caseload + training culture + brand trust" in one go. CityU’s 2016 press release^※ explicitly stated that after acquisition, the clinic would be operated modelled on the teaching hospital approaches of leading veterinary schools in Australia and the US, placing "educational excellence" alongside "quality animal care service".

The then Vice-Chancellor and President, Way Kuo, commented in the release:

"The prestigious Peace Avenue Veterinary Clinic has an impressive history of quality animal care service."

The then Dean of the veterinary school, Professor Michael Reichel, foreshadowed:

"Exciting new and cutting edge specialties will be added in phases in response to the dramatic changes taking place in veterinary medicine."

The phrase "in phases" is worth noting—it reveals that the acquisition was not a single, completed action, but a path that would take several years to unfold: first take over, then rename, then relocate and expand. The individual nodes of this path are detailed in a companion piece; what this article examines is the operations and governance after the takeover.

# What does "modelled on the teaching hospital approaches of leading veterinary schools in Australia and the US" actually mean?

The line in the press release about modelling on "the teaching hospital approaches of leading veterinary schools in Australia and the US" is not just generic boilerplate. In the Anglophone veterinary education system, nearly every accredited veterinary school is paired with a university-run Veterinary Teaching Hospital—students complete their clinical year there, and the cases serve as both treatment subjects and teaching material. Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine, with which CityU partnered, has the renowned Cornell University Hospital for Animals as its own teaching base. For its BVM to gain accreditation from the Australasian Veterinary Boards Council (AVBC) and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) in the UK, CityU had to replicate this twin set of "College + Teaching Hospital" (for accreditation details, see veterinary-college.md).

The difference lies in the pathway. Established overseas institutions mostly had a hospital first and then a college, or built both simultaneously; CityU did the reverse, having the college concept first, and then buying a ready-made hospital to complete the set. This "acquisition-led school-building" shortcut is rare among newly established veterinary education providers in Asia, and precisely because of this, it prematurely brought to the surface a problem usually hidden behind mature institutional frameworks: how can a university operate a public hospital?

# The transition period: what was "CityU Peace Avenue Veterinary Clinic" doing for those two and a half years?

Between the September 2016 acquisition and the April 2019 relocation, there was a transitional period of roughly two and a half years, often glossed over in timelines but critical for the acquisition’s "soft landing". According to CityU's 2016 press release^※, the clinic was renamed "CityU Peace Avenue Veterinary Clinic (CityU PAVC)" and continued normal operations at its original Liberty Avenue site in Ho Man Tin.

Retaining the words "Peace Avenue" was a deliberate act of continuity. Among Hong Kong pet owners, "Peace Avenue" was already a highly recognisable brand; an abrupt name change could have driven clients away. Adding "CityU" without discarding "Peace Avenue" allowed it to graft on the University’s reputation while preserving the trust vested in the old name. During these two and a half years, the clinic continued to see public patients on one hand, while on the other it began hosting veterinary students for clinical learning. Simultaneously, it progressively expanded its specialties "in phases", as Professor Michael Reichel had indicated—preparing for the 2019 move into a larger site and a relaunch under the new "VMC" brand. By the time the new Sham Shui Po premises opened, the clinic had already spent three years being integrated under the CityU umbrella, making the new brand’s debut a natural next step.

# How does a university run a hospital?—CityU Veterinary Health Group and its Board of Directors

This is the question this piece most wants to answer, and the one least often clarified: after CityU's acquisition, under whose name does the VMC fall, and who operates it? The answer is not "a university department", but an independent legal entity.

The CityU Veterinary Medical Centre is operated by CityU Veterinary Health Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University. According to a Times Higher Education report^※, CityU Veterinary Health Group and CityU Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory are both "subsidiaries owned by City University of Hong Kong", with Duncan Hockley serving as Executive Director and board member. In other words, structurally, the VMC is a business that is "owned by the University, operated by a company, and governed by a board", not an internal university unit in the administrative sense. This "corporatised" design allows a public university to legitimately charge fees to the public, employ clinical teams, assume the operational risks of 24-hour emergency care, while grafting teaching functions onto it.

The attendee list from the 2019 opening ceremony^※ lays out the personnel of this governance structure in plain sight. The following table is compiled from that official press release:

Reading through this list, one sees how CityU positions the VMC: it is not a laboratory clinic where "professors see patients on the side", but a formal operating entity with a chairman, an executive director, an advisory committee, and even a Legislative Council member serving on its board. The named individuals above all appear in a neutral, role-based context from the official press release; this archive simply records their names factually.

A remark by Executive Director Duncan Hockley at the ceremony^※ encapsulates the self-expectation of this corporatised organisation:

"Our team of veterinarians and support staff is committed to setting a standard of excellence for veterinary science and patient care."

# How much does VMC charge? How a university hospital serves both the public and teaching

Many assume a "university animal hospital" only handles cases for student practice. The opposite is true: the VMC is open to the public for appointments, a hospital where any pet owner can bring their cat or dog, with teaching merely layered on top of genuine medical care.

The pricing is the most direct evidence of this. According to a report by HK01^※, after relocating to Sham Shui Po in 2019, the fee levels were comparable to those of the Peace Avenue days: a basic consultation fee was approximately HK$280, while a specialist consultation cost about HK$1,800 depending on the condition (based on the March 2019 report). In other words, after taking over, CityU did not use its "university brand" to hike prices significantly but instead continued the original clinic's pricing—a critical step in retaining the trust of the old clientele.

In terms of scale, this hospital's public service volume is considerable. According to the same report^※, before relocation, the original Peace Avenue site saw an average of about 200 cases a day, of which 15% to 20% were emergencies, totalling roughly 60,000 cases a year. After moving to Sham Shui Po, the caseload was expected to "double". The VMC website's current wording states a monthly caseload of approximately 3,500 cases (see veterinary-college-2.md). In terms of team size, at the 2019 relocation it had about 180 staff and 37 veterinarians, including 11 new emergency and critical care specialists for the 24-hour emergency service.

The clearest embodiment of its "teaching hospital" ambition is its adoption of the triage mechanism used in human A&E departments for its veterinary hospital. According to HK01^※, the new centre abandoned "first-come, first-served" in favour of a human hospital-style system of triage by severity and urgency, prioritising critical cases to improve survival rates. Speaking about equipment upgrades, the then Veterinary Director, Jonathan Speelman, noted that the new site's 64-slice computed tomography (CT) scanner would be "faster, clearer, and more accurate" than the 16-slice CT at the old Peace Avenue site. This arrangement of "severity-based triage + a separate 24-hour emergency entrance" elevated a community pet clinic to an operational logic approaching that of a human hospital emergency room.

# Will a university opening a public hospital steal business from private vets?

A large animal hospital operated by a public university’s subsidiary, with moderate fees, inevitably raises a question: does it squeeze out private veterinary practices? Public records provide no direct answer to this, but a few facts can be placed side-by-side.

First, the VMC's positioning leans towards referral-level specialist and emergency care, not primary general practice. Equipped with a 1.5 Tesla MRI, a 64-slice CT, and Hong Kong's first animal intensive care unit (ICU), it handles complex cases that ordinary community clinics struggle with; many cases are actually referred by private vets. From this angle, its relationship with primary clinics is more akin to a division of labour than competition. Second, CityU consistently emphasises its tripartite public role of "teaching + service + research" rather than market expansion. According to Times Higher Education^※, the centre is simultaneously a platform for student clinical training and a site for clinical research targeting emerging diseases and health trends.

However, this only describes the structural and positioning level. Whether the VMC’s opening created actual market pressure on private competitors, or whether there were any public objections from the industry, is currently unverifiable—no checkable industry surveys or complaint records exist. This archive will not supplement this with speculation. What is certain is this: incorporating a privately-owned clinic that was already profitably operating into a university blurs the line between a "public institution" and "private healthcare" from the outset. The blurring of this line is exactly the institutional flexibility that allows the VMC to teach and charge, and it is also the root of occasional public questioning.

# Why did the Sham Shui Po neighbours object? A dispute over the use of Trinity Towers’ shopping arcade

To land the acquisition, CityU needed to find a big enough home for this ever-growing hospital. It set its sights on Trinity Towers (豐匯) at 339 Lai Chi Kok Road in Sham Shui Po—according to the Wikipedia entry for Trinity Towers^※, this is a private residential estate developed jointly by Cheung Kong Property Holdings and the Urban Renewal Authority, consisting of three blocks ranging from 31 to 42 storeys, with occupancy beginning in September 2015. What CityU wanted was the entire, perpetually vacant shopping arcade spanning the ground to second floors of the estate.

The problem lay precisely in the phrase "entire shopping arcade". According to the independent media outlet Radical HK^※, on 8 October 2016, CityU invited the Trinity Towers Owners' Corporation to the campus for a meeting. The corporation's side claimed they were told that the whole arcade would be turned into a 24-hour animal clinic serving the veterinary school. The corporation's objections centred on a few points: the sales brochure had specified the space as "shops", yet what was coming was an institution on the scale of a hospital involving teaching purposes, which they believed contravened the original land resumption intent and deprived local residents of daily amenities; opening a large-scale animal hospital in Sham Shui Po, a district already grappling with poor environmental hygiene, also raised their fears about the risk of zoonotic diseases being brought into the residential complex.

CityU's response, as relayed in the Wikipedia entry for the CityU Veterinary Medical Centre^※, was to address the owners' concerns in writing (via two letters dated 21 November 2016 and 14 January 2017). Ultimately, the shopping arcade was converted as planned into the CityU Veterinary Medical Centre, spanning roughly 33,000 square feet, and opened for business as scheduled.

This use dispute was the most community-adjacent aspect of CityU's "acquire-and-expand" route, and the one most easily overshadowed by radiant opening-day news. It is a reminder that the arrival of Southeast Asia's largest veterinary centre, beyond its equipment and specialties, also tugged at the very real concerns of ordinary residents in a residential tower about "what goes on downstairs".

# Is VMC CityU's only "teaching hospital"?

The VMC is the flagship of CityU's veterinary teaching, but it is not the sole site for clinical training. CityU's JCC website lists multiple service units functioning as "affiliated subsidiaries"^※, among them the Companion Animal Clinic, which further broadens the types of cases and clinical scenarios students encounter.

Beyond wholly-owned operations, CityU has also developed a network of affiliated teaching hospitals—establishing teaching collaborations with external private veterinary hospitals so that BVM students' clinical rotations are not confined to a single site. The local specialist veterinary hospital Zodiac Pet & Exotic Hospital, for instance, externally describes its partnership with JCC under the status of an affiliated teaching hospital of CityU. This layout of "one wholly-owned flagship (VMC) + several affiliated/subsidiary clinics" allows CityU to achieve a diversity of case types, covering exotic animals and rare species that a single hospital would struggle to encounter.

In other words, "CityU's teaching hospital" is a network, and the VMC is the largest knot in that net, not the entire net. This is a point often omitted from narratives that only recount the acquisition timeline.

# From PAVC to VMC and beyond: positioning from 2019 to 2026

Relocation and opening were not the end. As detailed in veterinary-college-2.md and veterinary-college.md, the current VMC site houses a 1.5 Tesla MRI, a 64-slice CT, and Hong Kong's first animal ICU. It features 22 consultation rooms and 9 operating theatres, covering internal medicine, neurology, dermatology, cardiology, ophthalmology, surgery, oncology, anaesthesiology and other specialties, plus a 24-hour emergency service. Based on the current wording on the VMC website^※, the emergency service operates "24 hours a day, 365 days a year", with general outpatient consultations from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. daily.

On a longer timeline, the VMC is only one piece of CityU's veterinary landscape. The University also established a Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (VDL, operational in 2018) and plans for the Jockey Club One Health Tower as the permanent home for the college (see veterinary-college.md). This means the "teaching hospital" function borne by the VMC is, in the long run, part of a synergy with the lab and the college building, not an isolated existence. As far as the "governance and operations" focus of this article is concerned, as of July 2026, the VMC remains operated by CityU Veterinary Health Group, open for public appointments, and situated in Trinity Towers, Sham Shui Po—the three facts that most define what it "is" have not changed since its 2019 opening.

A correction on the place name: The official designation for the VMC site is "G/F to 2/F, Trinity Towers, 339 Lai Chi Kok Road, Sham Shui Po"^※. In colloquial usage and some secondary texts (including earlier versions of this archive), it has occasionally been written as "三达广场", which is in fact a misnomer for the same estate. This archive adheres to the VMC official website and the Trinity Towers Wikipedia entry, uniformly recording it as "Trinity Towers (豐匯)". The main entrance is at the junction of Lai Chi Kok Road and Kweilin Street, with a separate emergency entrance located at 202 Yee Kuk Street—this "one address, two doors" layout was specifically designed to implement the emergency triage system described earlier.

# The other side of a university hospital: community partnerships and public health role

Viewing the VMC solely as a "fee-charging hospital" misses its other layer of duty as a university institution—that of community service and public health. According to CityU's 2019 opening news^※, the centre launched with collaborations with three organisations: providing free health checks and treatment for cats under the care of Caritas "Gato Home" programme; participating in Make-A-Wish Hong Kong's "A Real Vet For A Day" event, allowing children with critical illnesses the wish-come-true of being a vet for a day; and supporting the SPCA's Spay Neuter Assistance Programme (SNAP). These three initiatives address stray animal care, caring for sick children, and stray-animal population control, extending the hospital's role from "treatment" out into the "community".

What carries even greater institutional significance than community partnerships is its potential function as a public health sentinel. Hong Kong sits on a major bird migration route and neighbours agricultural zones in mainland China, and historically has seen early signals of zoonotic diseases (such as avian influenza) multiple times. A large animal hospital equipped with rapid diagnostic imaging, molecular diagnostics, and pathology capabilities, alongside its sister Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (see veterinary-college-2.md), can act as a "sentinel station" in the early disease surveillance chain—this is precisely the "One Health" framework CityU repeatedly emphasises: where the health of people, animals, and the environment is viewed as one interconnected whole.

It is intriguing that this same attribute of a "large animal hospital" was perceived as a zoonotic disease risk by Trinity Towers' owners, but is cast as a public health asset in CityU's narrative. Two different readings of the same fact precisely mirror the inherent tension when such an institution lands in a community: it is a facility that safeguards the health of both animals and the public, but also a neighbour that operates 24/7, bringing foot traffic and sanitation management pressures. This archive juxtaposes the two perspectives without judging which is right or wrong.

# Key facts at a glance: governance, service, and community dimensions

This table supplements the "chronology" found in the companion pieces, listing only key facts in the operations and governance dimension (for the year-by-year acquisition/relocation timeline, see veterinary-college-3.md):

---