The Postwar Curriculum Reforms In Nursing Higher Education In Japan And The Enlightenment

The national standard of nursing education curriculum in Japan was promulgated in 1949 and formally implemented in 1951. Since then, as the modern nursing concept transforms, it has received constant revision in the years of 1967, 1989, 1996 and 2008 to adapt to the social, economic and demographic changes in Japan. Some of the amendment were proved to be successful while others not. It is clear that there are some good lessons we can learn from those gains and losses.After 30 years of the adoption of the policy of reform and opening the door to the outside, we Chinese people have rapidly stepped from poverty to affluence. As the living standard improves, people are paying increasing attention to their health. And at the same time, as the population increases and ages, more and more requests are raised in medical area and the caring of the elderly. To meet those increasing needs, we will have to train a big number of high quality nursing professionals.Since 1980s, China had resumed higher education in nursing and significant development was made in 1990s in higher technical and vocational education in nursing. Despite the rapidly enlarging education scale, the reform in nursing curriculum system appears to be moving slowly, and curriculum configuration is yet to be more professional and reasonable. This situation has directly led to a relatively big gap between the qualification of the nursing professionals and social demands. This paper starts off by a complete and systematic review of the nursing higher education reforms in Japan since World War II in terms of their background, contents and characteristics. By comparing to the current status of nursing education curriculum setup in China, the paper finally has put forward a few policy suggestions.It has 3 chapters.Chapter1: Introduction. It covers the concerned background and the definition of the main concepts and the research scope. It also clarifies the purpose of the research, and the research strategy and methods as well.Chapter2: The postwar curriculum reforms in nursing higher education in Japan. It analyzes the background, contents and characteristics of each curriculum reform in higher education of nursing in Japan. For the most recent 2 reforms, detailed information is provided regarding the guidelines, curriculum framework and the education content.Chapter3: Enlightenment from the Japanese reforms in curriculum configuration. A few policy suggestions are made based on the historical review of the journey of Chinese nursing higher education and the insights from the corresponding Japanese practices. Those include: to safeguard the quality of higher nursing education by formulating a national standard for the nursing professional curriculum; to specify training targets and clarify nursing technical standards; to strengthen practical training by constituting reasonable curriculum framework.