An innovative teaching project led by Mr Ki Sum Samson Wong, Assistant Lecturer in the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit of the School of Clinical Medicine, LKS Faculty of Medicine at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has recently won a Gold Award in the Nurturing Wellbeing and Purpose category at QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) Reimagine Education Awards 2025. Mr Wong’s teaching initiative was the only Hong Kong-based entry to receive a Gold-level Award at this year’s QS Reimagine Education Awards and Conference held in London on December 1-3, 2025.
Often referred to as the “Oscars of Education,” the QS Reimagine Education Awards honour the most innovative and effective approaches to enhancing student learning experiences and employability outcomes. This year’s competition attracted over 1,600 submissions from around the world, evaluated through four rigorous rounds by a panel of over 1,300 international higher education and edtech experts. The Gold Award in the Nurturing Wellbeing and Purpose category is presented annually to one top initiative that enhances resilience, wellbeing, purpose and holistic growth for learners.
Experiencing patient death could evoke intense emotions in healthcare professionals. Mr Wong’s award-winning teaching practice, with full name titled “Immersive Video Gaming and Design Thinking for Building Pre-clinical Medical Students’ Self-Competence in Working with Death and Dying”, explores the untapped potential of immersive, interactive digital storytelling for young medical students’ learning about complexities of emotions from working with dying patients and in coping with patient loss.
Introduced into HKU’s MBBS medical humanities curriculum since 2022, this pilot adopts “That Dragon, Cancer” (2016) — an award-winning video game based on a real-life patient story and recommended in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for medical education — to help medical students reflect on coping with difficult emotions and helplessness elicited by work-related exposure to death and dying. This approach facilitates students’ holistic growth into caring physicians not only to patients and caregivers, but also for themselves as helping professionals.
Mr Wong expressed his gratitude for the recognition: “This award affirms my 11 years of experience in leading innovative teaching methods in HKU’s medical humanities programme, as well as my emphasis on developing emotional resilience and a sense of meaning in our students. I am honoured that QS spoke highly of this idea on this global stage”.
This accolade builds on Mr Wong’s teaching experience, including being named the inaugural Most Innovative Teacher of the Year in Asia by Times Higher Education for his contribution to promoting grief literacy training in medical education.
For more information about Mr Ki Sum Samson Wong’s past HKU Teaching Development Grant (TDG) project and teaching experience (in Chinese only) relevant to this award nomination, please visit:
