PT in Shanghai

Hi Guys, I'm not sure but looking back I think I have only done 3 posts and 4 comments, so here is a little bit from Shanghai, hope you find it interesting!

Today we arrived in Shanghai about 1am! (following another nervous plane ride and an even more nerve-wrecking car-ride- my understanding was always that red lights were for stopping at.. apparently not here!) In the morning we explored. My initial feeling is that I like Shanghai better then HK, not quite so crazy-busy and with a little more character. The juxtaposition between old and new, between western and eastern and between wealth and poverty is even more amazing here. You can see modern cement trucks pouring cement into rickshaws carried by old men back and forth to the building sites. In a busy intersection a bus gives way to a flock of bicycles while a taxi narrowly avoids a lady manually towing a rickshaw filled with what looks like all the furniture from her house.

We saw these men pruning trees. They were dressed in orange jump suits with helmets on but their similarity to workmen at home ended there. To prune the trees they stood in the trees amongst the power lines, with a rope far longer than the distance from the tree to the ground tied around their waist and onto the power lines! They wielded electric saws and let the branches fall onto the footpath and street, which was not petitioned off in any way, causing motorists and pedestrians to swerve and duck! Amazing! Any fraction of that picture would have had Occ Health and Safety tearing their hair out. Similarly within the first hour we had seen several groups working with welders on the footpath with no goggles or protective clothing and workers bent double, perched on top of high walls doing brick work by hand. Just another example I guess of what we take for granted, the right to a safe profession. A comment made was that this picture makes you realise that what we call “common sense” is not necessarily common. I am unsure if it is a difference in training, recourses, or the role played by the worker but here the responsibility for safety doesn’t seem to be held by anyone.

Some of my initial observations included:
- Limited play/ fun between children
- Limited age appropriate interaction
- The lerge percentage of athetoid and ataxic CP
- Poor standard of wheelchairs- no support or padding, very poor posistioning (although the comment was made that at least they don’t spend too much time in them)
- Poor manual handling- large necessity for parents to carry children
- Very poor facilitation of movement by staff and other handlers- no encouragement of independent movement between positions
- Excessive use of pull-to-sit and pull-to-stand
- The hydro pool is green- I’m hoping that’s just because its being fixed and the hygiene instruction passed on from the previous group have been taken on board

Downstairs there is a lot of very old strength-training equipment with questionable usefulness in this setting. The comment was made that there is perhaps a confusion between tone and strength, which often rings true back home as well. As this was part of my honours project hopefully I can have a closer look at this while I’m here. With this, the other comment was that the gifts given to centres such as this need to be carefully considered so that they are actually helpful and not just given to dump equipment that is not useful.