Who Runs CityU's Veterinary Medical Centre (VMC)? — The Vet Health Group, Fees, and the Sham Shui Po Trinity Towers Dispute

This article belongs to Module 11 "Medicine / Hospitals" of the Hong Kong City University Wild History Archive. This piece does not rehearse the acquisition timeline itself — the year-by-year narrative of the 1984 founding, the 2016 acquisition, and the 2019 relocation and expansion appears in the companion article veterinary-college-3.md; the current facilities, specialties, and diagnostic laboratory are covered in veterinary-college-2.md; the establishment and accreditation of the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC) are covered in veterinary-college.md.

This piece addresses a different set of questions: how does a public university "buy" and run a pet hospital open to the public? Who sits on its board and makes the calls, what does it charge, and how does it balance public service with teaching? And why did the choice of Sham Shui Po as its location provoke opposition from local residents? Facts carrying dates or figures are cited in place; where controversy exists, multiple sides are presented without adjudication, and source strength is flagged.

Conclusion in one sentence: The CityU Veterinary Medical Centre (VMC) is not run directly by a university department, but by CityU Veterinary Health Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of the University; it moved into Trinity Towers, Sham Shui Po, in 2019^※, occupies roughly 33,000 sq ft, and is one of the largest veterinary teaching hospitals in Southeast Asia, open to public registration at fees inherited from the old clinic.

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One afternoon in October 2016, representatives of the Incorporated Owners of Trinity Towers in Sham Shui Po were invited to CityU's campus and given news they had not expected: the entire ground-floor retail space, which had been sitting vacant, was to be converted into a 24-hour animal clinic on a scale comparable to a human hospital. According to the independent media outlet Radical HK^※, the owners' corporation objected on the spot — the sales brochure had described the space as "shops," and what was coming instead was an animal hospital. Almost exactly three months earlier, CityU had completed a very different acquisition in Mong Kok: the outright purchase of Hong Kong's first veterinary clinic founded by a locally trained vet. Those two threads converge in Sham Shui Po, and they make up the least-told side of the VMC's "previous life" — not the glamour of a college, but the mundane reality that a university opening a public hospital must first settle questions of "who runs it, what it charges, and where it goes."

# Who Founded the Peace Avenue Veterinary Clinic? A Sign Reading "Hong Kong's First Local Vet Clinic"

To understand why CityU coveted it, one must first know what was acquired. The Peace Avenue Veterinary Clinic (PAVC) was founded in 1984^※ on Peace Avenue in Mong Kok, and was the first veterinary clinic in Hong Kong established by a locally trained veterinarian. Its founder, Dr. Phillip C.K. Mak, earned his Bachelor of Veterinary Science (BVSc) from the University of Sydney in 1983^※, opened the clinic in Hong Kong upon his return in 1984, and later obtained a Master of Veterinary Science in Veterinary Surgery from Murdoch University in 1996.

The weight of this name lies in the word "local." Before the 1980s, companion-animal medicine in Hong Kong was dominated almost entirely by foreign-trained expatriate vets; a clinic founded by a locally trained practitioner and sustained for more than three decades was a rare credential in the industry. Some local pet media have compared it to the "Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital" of the pet world — such informal comparisons are hard to quantify, and this archive cites them only as anecdotal evidence of its industry standing, not as measurable fact.

What actually elevated this community clinic into a referral-level centre were three verifiable upgrades: in 2001 it was designated a training centre by the Veterinary Surgeons Board of Hong Kong^※, offering pre-registration in-service training for newly graduated vets; in 2004 it introduced Hong Kong's first MRI machine dedicated to animals^※, alongside a 24-hour specialty emergency and inpatient service; and in 2008 it moved to Liberty Avenue, Ho Man Tin, expanding to 18,000 sq ft^※. The significance of these three steps will become clear in the next section — CityU was not buying a plot of land but a clinical and training system that had been running for three decades. A full chronology of these milestones appears in veterinary-college-3.md; this piece will not rehearse them item by item.

# Why Would a Public University "Buy" a Pet Clinic Instead of Building Its Own?

In March 2014, CityU partnered with Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine to establish a School of Veterinary Medicine^※ (initially named the School of Veterinary Medicine). One hard prerequisite for international accreditation of its flagship six-year Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM) is that students must complete substantial clinical rotations in a real clinical environment. That forces a choice: build a teaching hospital from scratch, or buy one that already exists?

CityU chose the latter, and the logic is not hard to follow. Building from scratch means accumulating licence, premises, equipment, clients, and caseload from zero — yet what accreditors look at is precisely "whether there is a sufficient volume of real cases." Acquiring a clinic that had been operating for thirty years, held training-centre credentials, possessed both MRI and a specialty system, and enjoyed a stable client base amounted to buying, in one stroke, four things at once: "facilities + caseload + training culture + brand trust." CityU's 2016 press release^※ stated plainly that the acquired clinic would operate on the teaching-hospital model of leading Australian and American veterinary schools, placing "educational excellence" and "quality animal care service" side by side.

The then President, Professor Way Kuo, was quoted in the release:

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

The then Dean of the vet school, Professor Michael Reichel, added:

"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" deserves attention — it signals that the acquisition was not a one-off completion but a path to be unfolded over several years: take over first, rebrand next, relocate and expand later. Each node of that path is covered in the companion article; this piece concerns what happened after the handover, namely operations and governance.

# What Does "the Teaching-Hospital Model of Leading Australian and American Veterinary Schools" Mean?

The phrase in the press release about modelling the clinic on top-tier Australian and American veterinary schools is no empty boilerplate. In English-speaking veterinary education, an accredited veterinary school is almost always paired with a university-run Veterinary Teaching Hospital, where students complete their clinical year and where cases are at once patients and teaching material. CityU's partner, Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine, itself operates the renowned Cornell University Hospital for Animals as its teaching base. For CityU's BVM to pass accreditation by the Australasian Veterinary Boards Council (AVBC) and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS), it had to replicate this pairing of "college + teaching hospital" (accreditation details in veterinary-college.md).

The difference lies in the path. Overseas institutions of long standing typically had a hospital first, or built both together from the outset; CityU did the reverse — the college vision came first, and an existing hospital was bought to fill the gap. This shortcut of "building a college by acquisition" is rare among newly established veterinary programmes in Asia, and precisely because of that, it thrust to the surface a problem usually hidden inside mature institutions: how a university actually operates a public-facing hospital.

# The Transition Period: What Did "CityU PAVC" Do for Two and a Half Years?

From the September 2016 acquisition to the April 2019 relocation, there was a transition of roughly two and a half years — often skimmed over in timelines, yet critical to whether the acquisition could "land softly." According to CityU's 2016 press release^※, the clinic was renamed "CityU PAVC" after the acquisition and continued normal operations at its original Liberty Avenue premises in Ho Man Tin.

Keeping the words "Peace Avenue" was a deliberate piece of continuity design. Among Hong Kong pet owners, "Peace Avenue" was already a high-recognition brand; an abrupt renaming risked losing clients. Adding "CityU" while retaining "Peace Avenue" grafted the University's reputation onto the old name without forfeiting its trust. During those two and a half years, the clinic continued to see public patients while beginning to host vet-school students in clinical learning, and gradually expanded its specialties "in phases," as Professor Michael Reichel had put it — all in preparation for the move to larger premises in 2019 and the launch of a new brand as "VMC." By the time the Sham Shui Po site opened, the clinic had spent three years under CityU's wing, and the new brand could land naturally.

# How Does a University Run a Hospital? — CityU Veterinary Health Group and Its Board

This is the question this piece most wants to answer, and the one that is least often explained properly: after the acquisition, under whose name does the VMC sit, and who runs it? The answer is not "a university department" but a separate 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 — "University-owned, corporation-run, board-governed" — rather than an internal administrative unit. This layer of corporatisation is what allows a publicly funded university to legitimately charge the public, employ clinical staff, bear the operating risk of a 24-hour emergency service, and bolt teaching onto it.

The attendance list at the 2019 opening ceremony^※ puts the personnel of this governance structure on display. The following is drawn from that official press release:

Read through, the list reveals how CityU positions the VMC: this is not a laboratory clinic where "professors see patients on the side," but a formally constituted operating organisation with a chairman, an executive director, an advisory committee, and even a Legislative Councillor invited onto the board. All named individuals appear in a neutral capacity as recorded in the official press release; this archive records names as stated.

Executive Director Duncan Hockley's remark at the ceremony^※ captured the self-expectation of this corporatised body:

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

# What Does the VMC Charge? How a University Hospital Serves Both the Public and Teaching

Many assume a "university animal hospital" only handles cases for student training. In fact the opposite is true: the VMC is open to public registration — it is a hospital any pet owner can walk a cat or dog into, and teaching is a layer superimposed on real clinical practice.

Price is the most direct evidence. According to an HK01 report^※, after the 2019 move to Sham Shui Po, fee levels remained roughly the same as in the Peace Avenue era: a basic consultation fee of about HK$280, and specialist fees of around HK$1,800 depending on the condition (figures per the March 2019 report). In other words, CityU did not use its "university brand" to raise prices sharply on taking over; it carried over the original clinic's pricing — a crucial step in retaining the trust of old clients.

In scale, the hospital's public caseload is substantial. Per the same report^※, before the move the Peace Avenue site saw roughly 200 consultations a day, of which 15% to 20% were emergencies — a crude annual total of about 60,000 cases; after moving to Sham Shui Po, the expected caseload was forecast to "double." The VMC website's current figure is roughly 3,500 cases per month (see veterinary-college-2.md). As for staffing, at the time of the 2019 relocation there were approximately 180 staff and 37 veterinarians, including 11 emergency specialists added for the new 24-hour emergency service.

What best reveals the "teaching hospital" ambition is the translation of human-hospital emergency triage into a veterinary setting. According to HK01^※, the new centre no longer operates on a first-come, first-served basis; instead, modelled on human hospitals, patients are triaged by severity, so that critically ill cases are treated first to improve survival rates. The then Veterinary Director, Jonathan Speelman, said of the equipment upgrade that the new site's 64-slice CT scanner was "faster, clearer, and more accurate" than the 16-slice machine at the old Peace Avenue site. This arrangement — "triage by severity + a separate 24-hour emergency entrance" — pulls a community pet clinic into an operating logic close to that of a human emergency department.

# A Public Hospital Run by a University: Does It Steal Business from Private Vets?

A large animal hospital, run by a public university's subsidiary and priced low, inevitably invites the question: does it squeeze the space of private veterinary practice? Public sources offer no direct answer, but several facts can be set side by side.

First, the VMC's positioning leans toward referral-level specialties and emergency care, not primary outpatient care. With a 1.5T MRI, a 64-slice CT, and Hong Kong's first veterinary intensive care unit, it handles complex cases that ordinary community clinics cannot manage; many of its cases are in fact referred by private vets. From that angle, its relationship with primary clinics is closer to "division of labour" than "competition." Second, what CityU repeatedly emphasises is the three-in-one public role of "teaching + service + research," not market expansion. According to Times Higher Education^※, the centre serves both as a platform for students' clinical training and as a site for clinical research into emerging diseases and health trends.

However, that describes only the structural and positioning layer. Whether the VMC has in practice exerted competitive pressure on private practitioners since opening, and whether the industry has voiced public objections, is currently not verifiable — no auditable industry surveys or complaint records exist, and this archive will not fill the gap with speculation. What can be said with confidence is this: "incorporating" a private clinic that was already profitably operating into a university inherently blurs the line between "public institution" and "private healthcare." That blurring is both the institutional flexibility that lets the VMC teach and charge at once, and the root of the public scepticism it occasionally faces.

# Why Did Sham Shui Po Residents Object? A Use-Change Dispute at Trinity Towers

Having made the acquisition, CityU needed a large enough home for its growing hospital. It set its sights on Trinity Towers at 339 Lai Chi Kok Road, Sham Shui Po — per the Chinese Wikipedia entry for Trinity Towers^※, a private residential development by Cheung Kong Property and the Urban Renewal Authority, comprising three towers of 31 to 42 storeys, first occupied in September 2015. What CityU wanted was the entire retail complex from the ground floor to the second floor, which had been sitting vacant.

The problem lay in the words "entire retail complex." According to the independent outlet Radical HK^※, on 8 October 2016 CityU invited the Incorporated Owners of Trinity Towers to campus, where, the owners' group said, they were told that the whole shopping mall would be converted into a 24-hour animal clinic attached to the veterinary school. The owners' grievances clustered around several points: the sales brochure had designated the space as "shops," but what was coming was an institution on the scale of a hospital, involving teaching use; they considered this a breach of the original purpose and a loss of daily amenities for residents; and opening a large animal hospital in Sham Shui Po — an area whose sanitary environment was already poor — made them worry about the risk of zoonotic diseases being brought into the estate.

CityU's response, as relayed by the Chinese Wikipedia entry for the CityU Animal Medical Centre^※, came in written form — two letters dated 21 November 2016 and 14 January 2017 — addressing the owners' concerns. In the end, the mall was converted as planned into a CityU Veterinary Medical Centre of roughly 33,000 sq ft and opened for business.

This use dispute is the most community-adjacent face of CityU's "acquire-and-expand" route, and the one most easily buried under the glossy opening news. It is a reminder that even the largest veterinary centre in Southeast Asia, when it lands, touches a very concrete concern of ordinary residents in a residential tower: "what is going in downstairs."

# Is the VMC CityU's Only Teaching Hospital?

The VMC is the flagship of CityU's veterinary teaching, but it is not the only clinical training site. The Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC) lists several service units that are "affiliated CityU subsidiaries" on its website^※, including the Companion Animal Clinic, which further broadens the types of cases and clinical settings students encounter.

Beyond wholly owned entities, CityU has also developed a network of affiliated teaching hospitals — teaching partnerships with external private veterinary practices so that BVM students' clinical rotations are not confined to a single site. The local specialty hospital Zodiac Pet & Exotic Hospital describes itself publicly as a CityU affiliated teaching hospital in its partnership with the JCC. This layout — "one wholly owned flagship (the VMC) plus several affiliated/subsidiary clinics" — lets CityU cover case diversity that a single hospital would struggle to reach, including exotic animals and rare species.

In other words, the "CityU teaching hospital" is a network, and the VMC is the largest node in it — but not the whole of it. Accounts that tell only the acquisition timeline tend to miss this.

# After PAVC Became the VMC: Positioning from 2019 to 2026

The relocation and opening were not the endpoint. Per veterinary-college-2.md and veterinary-college.md, the VMC's current site is equipped with a 1.5-Tesla MRI, a 64-slice CT, and Hong Kong's first animal intensive care unit, with 22 consultation rooms and 9 operating theatres, covering internal medicine, neurology, dermatology, cardiology, ophthalmology, surgery, oncology, anaesthesia, and other specialties, plus 24-hour emergency care; per the VMC's current website^※, the emergency service operates "24 hours a day, 365 days a year," and general outpatient consultations run daily from 9:00 to 19:00.

On the longer timeline, the VMC is one link in CityU's veterinary landscape. CityU has also established the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (VDL, in operation since 2018), and has planned the Jockey Club One Health Tower as the college's permanent home (see veterinary-college.md). This means the VMC's "teaching hospital" function is, over the long run, part of a coordinated whole with the laboratory and the college building, not an island. On the question of "governance and operations," which is this piece's focus, as of July 2026 the VMC is still operated by CityU Veterinary Health Group, still open to public registration, and still located in Trinity Towers, Sham Shui Po — the three facts that most define what it is have not changed since opening in 2019.

A correction on the address: the VMC's official address is "G/F-2/F, Trinity Towers, 339 Lai Chi Kok Road, Sham Shui Po"^※, rendered in English as Trinity Towers. Informal and secondhand texts (including earlier versions of this site) have sometimes written it as "Sanda Plaza," which is in fact a misnomer for the same estate. This archive follows the VMC's official site and the Trinity Towers Wikipedia entry, and records it uniformly as "Trinity Towers (丰匯)." The main entrance is at the junction of Lai Chi Kok Road and Kweilin Street, with a separate emergency entrance at 202 Yee Kuk Street — this "one site, two doors" layout is precisely the arrangement for the triage-based emergency system described above.

# The Other Side of a University Hospital: Public-Good Partnerships and the Public-Health Role

To see the VMC only as a "fee-charging hospital" is to miss another layer of its responsibility as a university institution: public good and public health. According to CityU's 2019 opening announcement^※, the centre launched with three partnerships: free health checks and treatment for cats cared for under Caritas's "Gato Home" programme; participation in Make-A-Wish Hong Kong's "A Real Vet For A Day," letting sick children experience being a veterinarian for a day; and support for the SPCA's subsidised neutering scheme (SNAP). The three partnerships point respectively at stray-animal care, care for sick children, and stray-population control — extending the hospital's role from "treatment" to "community."

More significant institutionally than charitable partnerships is its potential role as a sentinel for public health. Hong Kong sits on a major migratory-bird flyway and borders mainland China's agricultural regions, and has repeatedly been the site of early signals of zoonotic diseases (avian influenza, for instance). A large animal hospital with fast imaging, molecular diagnostics, and pathology capacity — together with its sibling Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (see veterinary-college-2.md) — can act as a "sentinel station" in the early surveillance chain of epidemics. This is precisely the "One Health" framework CityU emphasises: the health of people, animals, and the environment treated as one.

What is intriguing is that the very same attribute — "large animal hospital" — reads as a zoonotic risk in the eyes of Trinity Towers residents and as a public-health asset in CityU's narrative. Two readings of the same thing neatly refract the tension such institutions carry when they land in a community: it is at once a facility that protects animal and public health, and a neighbour that runs 24 hours a day and brings foot traffic and sanitary-management pressure. This archive presents both perspectives side by side, without ruling which is right.

# Quick Facts: Governance, Services, and Community Dimensions

This table supplements the companion article's "timeline" with key facts in the operations and governance dimension (for the year-by-year acquisition/relocation timeline, see veterinary-college-3.md):

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