The working group Medicine in Supportive Education and Inclusive Social Development brings together anthroposophically oriented therapeutic professionals from various disciplines who are working in the Council’s fields of activity.

If you are interested, please feel free to contact us.

Coordination of the working group: Gabriele Förster

Coordination by the leadership team: Jan Göschel
jan.goeschel@goetheanum.ch

Gabriele Förster, Ärztin der Camphill Dorfgemeinschaften Lehenhof/DE ist im Gespräch mit einer Gruppe von Ärzt:innen aus Italien, England und Schottland.
Zwei Mal haben sie sich digital getroffen und beschlossen, sich monatlich fortzubilden, eine Art «self peer learning group» als Beginn, bevor Größeres daraus entstehen kann.
Zunächst wird die Arbeit auf Englisch beginnen und man plant, dass man in Zukunft weitere Kolleg:innen einladen kann, Interessierte sind aus Taiwan, England und Russland.
In loser Planung ist, sich im Sommer vielleicht in Schottland zu einer Arbeitstagung zu treffen.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to offer a working group at the upcoming Medical Section Annual Meeting, as all working group offering opportunities were already full.

Text: Sonja Zausch

During the International Conference in Dornach in autumn 2022, a group of interested colleagues met for an exchange. There were people striving to continue the working group during the Covid pandemic. A joint working meeting at Lake Constance 2020 on the main topic of autism had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.

Various aspects became visible at the meeting:

• How do we manage to keep the focus on the health of the person with assistance needs according to the anthroposophical understanding of the human being in good interdisciplinary cooperation with therapists, nurses, doctors and house managers in living communities and other accompanying professionals from curative education and social therapy?
• How can we connect to existing training and strengthen and professionalize the focus on people with assistance needs? E.g. in the training of doctors and nurses. Could a focus module on “curative education” be added here?
• Should more medical knowledge also be taught in the training courses for curative education/social work?
• Could continuing education modules be offered on focused topics that would then be appealing and appropriate for all of the above professional groups?

Gabriele Förster, doctor of the Camphill Village Communities Lehenhof/DE, has agreed to take over the further coordination of the working group.

Text: Sonja Zausch

Due to the pandemic, among other things, it is unfortunately not possible for the working group “Medicine in Curative Education and Social Therapy”, founded in 2019, to further deepen its work at the moment. The aim was to develop and implement a further training course for colleagues in medical professions to deepen their knowledge of curative education.

In gemeinsamer Absprache haben wir nun Folgendes entschieden:
Es gibt im Council eine sehr schöne neue Dynamik mit einer größeren Gruppe jüngerer Kolleg*innen, die regelmäßig gemeinsam an Zukunftsimpulsen in der Heilpädagogik und Sozialtherapie arbeiten.
Die von uns angestrebte Begegnung zwischen den verschiedenen Gesundheitsberufen spielt dort insofern eine Rolle, als dass die Internationale Herbsttagung des Councils am Goetheanum 2022 (5. bis 9. Oktober – Save the Date!) sich im größeren Sinne der «Medizin, Pflege und Therapie» widmen wird.

Therefore, we feel it is healthy that this working group initiative gets integrated into this conference and that it remains open to what will come out of it in terms of content and socially after the meeting, to then make a new joint grip.

We would be pleased if the contributors of this working group would get involved in the preparation of this conference and concretely contribute their professional knowledge.

In the summer of 2021, we will launch a first call, addressing all colleagues from the areas of nursing, therapies as well as physicians. For this purpose, we will also rely on the network of the Medical Section through IKAM.

Johannes Weinzirl reports at the Meeting of the Council’s Delegates in October 2019 about the increasing concern of several younger physicians since spring 2019 to re-impulse medicine within curative education and social therapy, from which a beautiful work together with nurses, therapists and curative educators/social therapists has emerged.

The meeting with the delegates at the meeting served to get to know each other and to work together in small groups on the question:

Which human-ities concepts and practical tools have proven themselves in everyday work in order to meet the special needs of people in need of assistance? What approaches to anthroposophical human studies have proved their worth and should be taught in further education?

Among the feedback in plenary, the following helpful notes and topics were particularly helpful:

• Focus on training sensory perception.
• What is a child-friendly development or, in general, the question of the biography of the individual people, “How do you become?”
• Clarification of the understanding of roles and cooperation in the therapeutic community towards the development of a common basis of trust.
• How do you bring the diagnosis to life? What gestures and emotional forces are behind the classical diagnoses?
• Occupation with R. Steiner’s lecture on the unleashing of the self and its effects (GA 174 / 14 January 1917)
• No matter which human-knowledge concept (4-division, 3-division, 7 life processes or 12 senses) is used, a language is important for the mediation.

The initiative group will meet again in spring 2020 and will continue to work on a concept of continuing training with an interdisciplinary approach.