Holiday causes more dental, heart woes
DENTAL and cardiovascular diseases are the main reasons people visited hospitals for consultation and treatment, local doctors said yesterday, the first working day after the Spring Festival holiday.
Because most people stayed at home during weeklong holiday due to COVID-19, high-fat diets and unhealthy lifestyles have led to dental problems, some of them acute.
“Too much entertainment and irregular sleeping patterns during the holiday can cause fatigue and a reduction of saliva generation, decreasing people’s periodontium immunity,” said Dr Wang Ying of Shanghai Ren’ai Hospital. “Consequently, bacteria can cause various dental problems like acute pulpitis and ulcers. Maintaining good dental habits like brushing teeth before going to bed is very important, especially for those with dental diseases. Eating high-fiber food is also beneficial for teeth.”
Officials from Shanghai Yodak Cardio-Thoracic Hospital said people seeking cardiology consultation and treatment increased after the holiday, most with coronary disease or hypertension.
“High-fat, high-calorie diets and generally unhealthy lifestyles during the holiday are the main reason for the uptick,” said Dr Sun Baogui from Shanghai Yodak.
Sun said people with a history of cardiovascular diseases and the elderly should have low-salt and low-fat diets, exercise regularly and undergo regular checkups.
“It’s important to immediately visit a hospital on experiencing symptoms like chest pain and shortness of breath,” he added.
The benefits of building core competencies for a turbulent and uncertain future are manifold. Not only will teams be skilled to work in transformed settings, but they will also be more capable of managing the considerable demands of the redrawn work environment.
Shlomo Ben-Hur
COVID-19 has undoubtedly been a stressor to the system, but in terms of corporate education, the writing was on the wall way before the pandemic struck. Learning & Development (L&D) is in desperate need of a 21st century makeover on two vital fronts.
First, in order to shape and build competencies for an era of digitalization and automation in which varied organizational structures and diverse workforces become the norm.
Secondly, corporate education must play catch-up with significant changes in teaching methodologies and the potential offered by technology.
Let’s begin with some background: In pedagogical terms, organizational learning has long been mired in an academic approach that favors theoretical over more practical learning approaches.
Systems theorists since the 1950s had promised “learning organizations” would be the natural outcome of cumulative organizational proficiency.
However, these failed to materialize, largely as a result of the misdirected focus on theory rather than outcomes.
The theoretical approach also meant learning was neither assessed for its behavioral nor its business impact.
In terms of bang for your buck, therefore, the absence of key performance indicators has made learning’s value as an intervention impossible to evaluate.
Against that pedagogically stymied backdrop, seismic shifts are taking shape in the workplace and COVID-19 has only caused them to accelerate.
Eight underlying trends continue to impact organizations.
By understanding them, leaders can engage L&D teams to focus and deliver measurable performance impacts in key areas that align learning with business strategy, harness technology to drive behavioral change, apply a businessfocused governance and, finally, to drop the academic tenor.
These changes will transform your corporate education and in turn pay dividends to your enterprise.
The importance of L&D leadership to organizational competitiveness, performance and cohesion cannot be underestimated.
If you, as a senior leader, find yourself unable to communicate with your L&D team, it is time to question the underlying assumptions that may be posing an obstacle. It may even be time to seek out L&D personnel who can better address your strategic business concerns with time-bound, state-of-the-art solutions that can drive them forward.
The eight seismic shifts your L&D team must address now to be ready for
beyond COVID-19.
1. The pace and scale of industry disruption.
We all know the destruction wrought on businesses by the pandemic. However, if you are in an industry characterized by either complacency, customer frustration or unaddressed tension points, it is likely to be disrupted by a known or unknown competitor.
Have you worked out where the fault lines lie in your sector? How can you build competencies to address them head-on with your learning agenda?
2. Organizational structures have transformed.
We have seen a clear shift toward project-based work, the partnering of internal and external staff and quick adaptations enabled by flatter structures.
Where are your organizational bottlenecks? Do your people need help developing collaborative competencies and agile decision-making skills?
3. Technology-driven changes to jobs.
In the last decade researchers from the University of Oxford placed the percentage of US jobs likely to be at risk as a result of automation at 47 percent.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only hastened the rush to automate. Digitalization, too, will have far-reaching consequences on livelihoods.
How will it affect your workforce? How can your L&D start to create competencies for a digitalized organizational future?
4. Workforce diversity.
An increasingly diverse and inclusive talent pool made up of Boomers, Gen X-ers and Y-ers and traditionalists will each bring their capabilities and working preferences to your organizations. Getting them to gel and collaborate effectively will require forethought and skilled training. Is this on your L&D agenda?
5. A shifting social contract.
More than 50 percent of all new jobs created in the EU and 40 percent in the US since 2010 are temporary. The uncertainty brought about by such precarity is impacting individuals and society. From the wariness it introduces between colleagues, to people having to settle down much later in life due to career instability, your workforce is reacting to environmental pressures. L&D could play a role in addressing such factors and in turn improve team cohesion and productivity.
6. Remote working.
The year 2020 saw the acronym WFH (working from home) going mainstream and increasingly employers view hybrid working as the new norm. However, as a myriad lifestyle articles written over the past year attest, issues of work-life balance, social ties and community are rendered more fragile in WFH scenarios. How is your L&D keeping your teams cohesive and connected?
7. The work culture is in flux.
Boundaries between working and nonworking hours are blurring and there is no longer a clear-cut retirement age. Employee surveys illustrate stress, anxiety and depression are on the rise, with serious social impacts. Is empowering staff to manage workload and apply healthy boundaries part of your L&D remit?
8. The education sector is in transformation.
The 4th Industrial Revolution will demand new skills and technology will provide scalable solutions to do so. In addition, learning itself has become an everyday activity and technology will drive this more informal process further forward.
The EdTech sector is on a steep growth trajectory worth US$404 billion by 2025, according to HolonIQ. Digital tools that embed learning within systems or offer other innovative approaches will become vital to keep skills updated. How is your L&D team preparing to harness it to better serve your teams?
The benefits of building core competencies for a turbulent and uncertain future are manifold.
Not only will teams be skilled to work in transformed settings, but they will also be more capable of managing the considerable demands of the redrawn work environment.
What is clear is that learning can’t be ignored. In fact, it is time to play catch-up.
THE first group of Chinese astronauts who have been selected for the mission of building China’s space station is undergoing training for extravehicular activities, or EVA, preparing for the scheduled manned space mission.
According to the China National Space Administration, a total of 11 missions to build China’s space station are planned for the next two years, including the construction of the core module that is scheduled to be launched in the first half of this year, two lab capsules, as well as four manned craft and four cargo craft.
At the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing, Wang Yaping, a female Chinese astronaut who traveled for 15 days in space in June 2013, put on training suits weighing more than 120kg and entered a large water tank with the help of a mechanical arm.
Water provides the best medium on Earth for simulating weightlessness in space and helps astronauts train for
EVA, such as spacewalking and maintenance. The water training tank, 10 meters deep and with a diameter of 23 meters, is the largest in Asia.
During the training session lasting more than four hours, seven divers assisted Wang to complete her tasks, while staff also monitored proceedings from a control room.
Wang Yanlei, a staff member at the center, said that to simulate a five-hour mission in space, an astronaut will undergo 50 hours of underwater training on Earth. Each session lasts four to six hours.
He said if it is a complicated task or involves many maneuvers, the astronaut will become exhausted and lose 1 to 2 kilograms by the end of the session.
Last month, the China Manned Space Agency said the core module of China’s planned space station has passed a factory review, along with the project’s Tianzhou-2 cargo craft.
ROBUST trade transactions between China and the European Union last year have demonstrated strong resilience and enormous potential in bilateral economic partnership despite the ravaging pandemic and a reeling global economy.
According to Eurostat, the EU’s statistical service, China has surpassed the United States to become the EU’s top trading partner last year while both sides have also seen a substantial increase in exports to each other’s marketplaces.
Given the dwindling overall global trade amid the still-raging pandemic, dynamic China-EU trade ties are indeed hard-won.
The continued growth in trade is partially a result of robust cooperation between Beijing and Brussels to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.
To beat the deadly pathogen, China and the EU countries have harnessed the power of solidarity by offering each other medical supplies, as well as sharing experience on vaccine development, clinical treatment and cross-border management.
Meanwhile, the brisk two-way trade benefits from the strong economic complementarity between the two sides. This can explain why the China-Europe freight train service has kept running across the Eurasian landmass amid the pandemic.
Last year saw a record 12,406 China-Europe freight train journeys, up 50 percent from 2019. The train trips hit 1,165 in January, up 66 percent year on year.
At this time of coronavirus crisis, this modern-day transregional camel fleet has been playing an indispensable role in maintaining momentum for bilateral trade activities and ensuring a stable supply of goods in China, Europe and other countries along the routes.
The rapid recovery of the Chinese economy is also a key reason why many European firms continue to have faith in the Chinese market and expand their investment halfway around the world.
Last year, such European enterprises as BMW, Daimler and Siemens scaled up investment and production capacity in China. In 2020, Airbus delivered 99 commercial aircraft to China, representing 17.5 percent of its annual global deliveries. In the fourth quarter, notably, the China proportion accounted for 25 percent of the European plane-maker’s global deliveries.
The resilient China-EU economic partnership has also offered a glimpse of an even brighter future for bilateral economic cooperation.
In 2020, China and the EU concluded the negotiations on the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment and signed a geographical indications agreement. The two sides also decided to build up partnerships for green and digital cooperation.
Those agreements will in the coming months and years create more business opportunities and help companies of both sides to further tap the potential in each other’s markets.
While fostering a new development paradigm, China will, as has been promised, continue to expand opening-up and level its domestic playing field, creating greater opportunities and more favorable investment environment for all countries worldwide, including the EU members.
The buoyant bilateral trade and economic partnership have once again proved that when the two sides stick to mutuallybeneficial cooperation, they will be rewarded handsomely even in days of difficulties.
Looking into the future, as long as Beijing and Brussels continue to hold their hands together, and focus on promoting win-win cooperation in a pragmatic manner, they will reap even greater benefits.