Prof. Emily Chan Ying-yang, assistant professor at the School of Public Health and the Department of Community and Family Medicine, and Prof. Dennis Lam Shun-chiu, Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, have been selected for the Hong Kong Humanity Award 2007.
The Hong Kong Humanity Award 2007, co-organized by the Hong Kong Red Cross and Radio Television Hong Kong, is the first award of its kind in Hong Kong aimed at recognizing individuals who have made outstanding contributions to humanitarian causes, such as protecting human life, and caring for the health of the vulnerable.
Prof. Emily Chan Ying-yang, a pioneer in Asia in providing medical humanitarian assistance, was the organizer of the first international medical assistance team to provide public health education to minority groups in Hong Kong during the SARS outbreak in 2003.
For the past 10 years, Prof. Chan has been an active field medical volunteer for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), UNICEF, HelpAge International, and Merlin. In 2000 she was appointed as the president of MSF in HK and became the first Asian female and the youngest person assigned to the role. She has worked in projects spanning over 15 different countries, including China, East Timor, Kosovo, Burma, and the Philippines and most recently in Pakistan.
Prof. Dennis Lam Shun-chiu is a strong advocate for blindness prevention and has been fully committed to serving and helping patients to see again. In 1991, he became the founding honorary director of the Kung Wah Lee Eye Tissue Laboratory, the first 'active' eye bank in Hong Kong. Through actively persuading relatives of the recently deceased to approve eye donation, the donation rate had surged from one to two donors per year in the 1980s to 100 to 200 in the 1990s. In 2004 he further established the first 'active' eye bank in Shantou.
In 1999, Prof. Lam founded the Action for Vision Eye Foundation to raise public awareness of eye care and provide free community eye screening and surgery for the underprivileged in Hong Kong. He then founded the Project Vision Charitable Foundation in 2006 that aims at establishing 100 charity eye centres in impoverished areas of China. Training up the local medical team helps to sustain the provision of quality and affordable services. The first two charity eye centres, one in Inner Mongolia and one in Shaanxi, have already been set up and running.