This year again, I took part to the annual meeting of the Japanese Society of Clinical Pathway on December 9-10. This year, it took place in Tokyo, at the prestigious Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku and the chairman was Prof. Fukui of St Luke International Hospital.
The theme of the 12th edition was: the Future of Multi-Disciplinary Team Care.
The main topics covered this year were mostly recurring with respect to previous years:
1. Critical Indicators (CI) or Quality Indicators (QI)
2. Analysis of Variance, and Outcome Master
3. Pathway of Regional Cooperation
4. Multi-disciplinary Team
5. DPC (diagnosis procedure combination) and Clinical Pathway
Moreover, this year, 2 special guests were invited:
Prof. Shigeaki Hinohara, who turned 100 years old this year, and delivered a powerful message on stage, about the concept of Team Based Learning. Truely amazing.
Prof. Junichiro Kawaguchi, professor of aerospacial research at Kyoko University, who talked about a completely unrelated topic (apparently, at least): the amazing story of Hayabusa, the spacecraft which made a 7 year trip into space before landing back on Earth, after multiple technical troubles.
And last but not least, this year’s conference also covered the terrible earthquake of Tohoku (Northern Japan) and its consequences in the medical world.
The attendence was more than 2,400 people, less than average, but not too bad considering the difficult year it was for Japan.
Hier, j’ai fabrique ce sapin de Noel tout en bois.
Qu’en dites-vous? Pas mal, non?
Il y a encore du travail pour le poncer, mais je pense ne pas le peindre et garder le bois brut.
Et en plus, il est demontable, ce qui est un avantage pour un sapin de Noel…
[...] Waldorf education is based on man as a threefold being. That he thinks, feels and wills, that he is head, heart and limb, is taken to be obvious. Event that he consists of body, mind [...] and spirit [...] is widely accepted. Yet it can hardly be said that these distinctions have entered deeply into educational practice. There the intellectual approach has grown more dominant at all levels. [...]
The headwise approach, as we have called it, has serious consequences. Is the child brainy, will he be able to pass exams, are questions that weight greatly on parents. The non-exam child, the child in whom heart and limb do not keep pace with the head, comes to be looked on as inferior. Art and the crafts play second fiddle. Thus all the three phases, infant, child and adolescent, are pressed forward intellectually and this has consequence for the whole life. The clever ones are extolled, but where are the artists and the craftsmen who embellish life and give it greater quality? They are rare to find.
But the effects of overemphasis on head and brain learning go further than this. We see how children in the kindergarten lose their spontaneous genius for play. They grow restless, are bored or get uncontrolled, and then they need adults with their thought-out games and learning devices to engage and entertain them. What belongs properly to the first years of schooling is pushed down prematurely into the pre-school years. That means drawing the children into their nervous system, making them ‘heady’ too soon; but that in turn also means robbing them of their early powers of imagination, the source, if allowed to play itself out naturally, of greater creativity in later life. Then, as is seen so clearly in public life, we arrive at adults who fall short of demand, who cannot enter with imagination into the problems, mainly human problems, that confront them, and therefore cannot arrive at the needed solutions.