CHARITY CULTURE-ORIENTED LIFE EDUCATION: A TALENT TRAINING MODEL OF TCM PSYCHOLOGY IN RESPONSE TO GLOBAL AGEING: A CASE STUDY OF HUACHIEW CHALERMPRAKIET UNIVERSITY AND POH TECK TUNG FOUNDATION

Abstract

Against the backdrop of global population ageing and the shortage of psychosomatic care professionals, contemporary medical education often prioritizes technical competency while neglecting compassion training and life literacy. Rooted in the century-old overseas Chinese charitable heritage and good deeds culture of Thailand’s Poh Teck Tung Foundation, Huachiew Chalermprakiet University (HCU) has developed a distinctive whole-person training programme for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) psychology. Using real disaster-response and hardship encounters as immersive life education classrooms, the curriculum integrates reflection on suffering, compassion formation, and psychosomatic professional training, addressing the humanistic deficits prevalent in mainstream medical psychology education. This paper adopts an embedded single-case study design to unpack the logical framework, practical pathways, and educational values of the HCU TCM psychology programme underpinned by Poh Teck Tung’s charitable and good deeds culture. Findings indicate that life education anchored in disaster and suffering, with charity and good deeds culture as its foundation, deepens the essence of medical education and produces compound TCM psychology practitioners equipped with both benevolent compassion and professional psychosomatic service capacity. Such graduates are highly needed in elderly mental health services, post-disaster psychological support, and community psychosomatic interventions, with irreplaceable practical value. This research extends the theoretical repertoire of international medical life education and offers a transferable innovative paradigm for psychosomatic workforce development worldwide.