Comparison of Verbal and Emotional Responses of Elderly People with Mild/Moderate Dementia and Those with Severe Dementia in Responses to Seal Robot, PARO.

Introduction: The differences in verbal and emotional responses to a baby seal robot, PARO, of elderly people with dementia residing at an elderly nursing care facility were analyzed. There were two groups of elderly people: one was with mild/moderate dementia (M-group) that consisted with 19 elderly residents in the general ward, and the other was with severe dementia (S-group) that consisted with 11 elderly residents in the dementia ward.

Method: Each elderly resident in both groups interacted with either PARO or a control (stuffed lion toy: Lion) brought by a staff at each resident's private room.

A freshman orientation program to provide an overview of the medical learning roadmap.

International accreditation of medical education was introduced in Japan in 2013 and is planning to be applied in late 2014 or 2015. Students will need to cope with the resulting changes and to recognize by what route they will learn medicine. Therefore, a freshman orientation course, which was based on problem-based learning (PBL) and had been held for first-year students, was modified as an awareness reform program in which students would learn "how to learn medicine.

A trial of improvement of immunity in cancer patients by laughter therapy.

Purpose: The study was on the impact of laughter therapy on immunological improvement of patients with gastrointestinal cancer undergoing surgery and chemotherapy.

Materials & Method: Immunological measurements were performed in 41 cases with patients aged 68.9 years suffering from gastric or colorectal cancer.

A case of laughter therapy that helped improve advanced gastric cancer.

We have reported the case of a patient diagnosed as having advanced gastric cancer at the age of 88 years old. An endoscopy revealed a type-2 gastric cancer of 25 x 30 mm in the lesser curvature of the middle stomach body and an IIa gastric cancer with T2 SS and cardiac accessory lesions. Both the type-2 and IIa lesions were defined as tub1 with surrounding atrophic gastritis and entero-epithelium metaplastic carcinoma.

Colored-hearing synesthesia.

According to the experimental study of synesthetic tendencies in a total of 104 subjects, the angry voice of the queen of the night from Mozart is pictured as the colors red and yellow. The voice of lament was pictured as yellow. The colors of 'angelic tones' were perceived as cool colors.

Brand strengthening decision making delved from brand-contacts in health services organizations.

Under the Japanese Government's strong enforcement of Japanese national medical cost reduction, only hospitals which emphasize patient values, and creation of brands according to them can survive. This study extracted patients' expectations as brand from Campbell's Brand-Contact lists. The authors also proposed to add Brand-strengthening strategies both for short-term strategies (large improvement is not required) and for long-term strategies (restructuring hardware and systems).

Revised sunflower-SHELL model--an analysis tool to ensure adverse-events' factor analysis and followed by patient safety strategy.

Background: The original SHELL model is specified for analyzing human errors. In addressing medical errors, medical systems should be targeted for improvement instead of blaming human errors. The Sunflower-SHELL model was made for patient-centered incident analysis.

[Peer review method for quality evaluation--methodology of Emergency Medicine Study Group for Quality about trauma management].

Education, resident training, guidelines, and evaluation are necessary to improve health care quality. Changing the resident system, re-organizing medical associations and Evidenced-Based Medicine (EBM) are becoming popular, and clinical practice using guidelines has been stressed in recent years in Japan. However, clinical evaluation is generally not so popular, except within internal conferences, and during short discussions at medical societies, although evaluation of the hospital services is on going by the Japanese Council for Quality Health Care (JCQHC).