The reform of medical education in Japan is now rapidly progressing. Renovation of postgraduate educational programs of each specialty is urgently necessary. For the specialty training of pathology or laboratory medicine, we consider it necessary to notice the discrepancy between the social needs for pathologists in community hospitals and the lack of educational programs for combined courses of anatomical and clinical pathology in Japan. This discrepancy has been disregarded by academic societies, and there have been almost no combined courses in Japan. Many anatomical or clinical pathologists assigned to the community hospital's central laboratories have had difficulties of self-learning without sufficient guides or educational programs.
In this symposium, we reviewed the past and present conditions of postgraduate education on anatomical and clinical pathology in Japan, and intended to find major obstacles for the development of the combined courses. We discussed on the problems of specialty training of pathologist in Japan in comparison with the standard training programs of AP/CP in USA. We hope for the collaborative works by relevant academic societies to the development of a new and efficient curriculum for the combined courses to suc-ceed in the general reform of specialty training system.

*1Department of Laboratory Medicine, National Defense Medical College, Tokorozawa 359-8513