The Ambassador of Ireland Declan Kelly and the CEO of RCSI Professor Cathal Kelly hosted a reception to celebrate the launch of the Perdana University-RCSI School of Medicine at the Ambassador's Residence, Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, 16 June 2011. RCSI President Professor Eilis McGovern travelled to KL for the event.

In September 2011, the new Perdana University-RCSI School of Medicine will accept its first 100 undergraduate medical students. Its five-year degree will be based on the programme offered by the 227-year-old RCSI medical school in Dublin. Professor Anthony Cunningham will be the Foundation Dean of the programme at Perdana University-RCSI School of Medicine.

The new undergraduate medical programme at Perdana University extends RCSI's long-standing educational involvement with Malaysia. Malaysian nationals have come to RCSI in Dublin, Ireland for the full undergraduate medical programme and for professional medical education for decades, with Malaysian students constituting about one in five undergraduate students. In addition, for 15 years, in association with University College Dublin, RCSI has run Penang Medical College (PMC) in Penang.

The PMC ‘twinning' programme has been in operation since 1996, where students complete the first half of training in Dublin and then transfer to Penang for hospital and community training. In Spring 2011, an agreement was reached to include a linked campus in Terengganu State, with students coming to Dublin for the early programme and reverting back to clinical training sites in Terengganu.

RCSI is delighted to have the opportunity to join Tan Sri Mohan Swami in realizing his vision for a world class medical centre in Kuala Lumpur. The Perdana University Initiative is part of the Kuala Lumpur Academic Medical Centre (AMC) which is a proposed development for a centre of excellence for medicine in Malaysia. The AMC will be a custom built medical campus primarily composed of a 600-bed private hospital, a research centre, and Perdana University - incorporating an undergraduate medical programme run by RCSI and a graduate entry programme run by Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, US.

AMC is an important Public Private Partnership with the Government of Malaysia and was launched under the patronage of Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, in November 2010.

The development of the AMC will be carried out in a phased manner, with the final campus for the medical schools and hospital scheduled to be delivered in 2014. The final Perdana campus will be located close to Putrajaya, with easy access to the city centre of Kuala Lumpur and its Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Until then, the medical schools will be located at a nearby interim campus.