TOKYO -- The medical- and nursing-care sector will be one of the biggest employers in Japan as the number of workers is expected to increase from the current 2.5 million to around 10 million, according to a government forecast released in February. However, experts wonder if the projection is correct.

Who wants to work in nursing?

Nursing-care providers are chronically short on staff. Job offers for the sector now outnumber all other areas at a Hello Work public employment office in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture. They account for 30% of all posted offers there.

"I've never thought of working in the nursing-care sector because work is hard and pay is low," said a 48-year-old retired die maker. He visited the office to look for a manufacturing job.

None of the 10 job seekers interviewed at the office were willing to work in the care sector.

Junko Nishioka, chief economist at RBS Securities Japan, estimates that Japanese companies, especially those suffering hard times, have a total of 2.6 million unneeded workers. The government forecast assumes that most workers will want to join medical- and nursing-care services.

Nursing-care workers total 1.5 million at present. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry forecasts that 2.5 million such workers will be needed in 2025 when all members of the baby-boomer generation become 75 or older. The nursing-care sector will therefore need 1 million more workers over the coming decade. But labor turnover in the business remains high, in the upper half of the 10% level. Another issue is that 70% of workers leave the sector and are replaced by new workers every three years.

"It's a waste of time to think about how to increase the number of nursing-care workers," said Masanobu Niikawa, 63, founder and chairman of a Tokyo company that sends senior citizens to nursing-care facilities. Founded two years ago, the company, called Kaientai Honbu, has dispatched a total of 200 workers with an average age of 69.

Workers dispatched to nursing homes engage in support work such as carrying meals and cleaning. They earn 80,000 yen ($773.77) to 90,000 yen per month, if they work three days a week. Despite the low wages, a large number of elderly citizens apply for the work in order to top up their pension benefits.

Time for a new approach

The presence of assistants helps the shortage of labor in nursing services as they enable qualified staff to reduce their heavy workloads.

Tomoya Kondo, senior economist at Daiwa Institute of Research, said care services are mostly provided by small companies and have a lot of room for productivity improvements due to delays caused by divisions of labor and the achievement of large-scale operations.

While the population of Japan is aging at the fastest rate in the world, the heavy burden of addressing the associated problems calls for renewed wisdom and ingenuity. The question is whether the government is keeping up with such advances by adopting appropriate and timely policies.

If the scarcity of care workers cannot be resolved, the government needs to consider how to reduce the need for care.

Germany is also facing a decrease in population and the corresponding increase in demand for nursing services. They added a "robot suit" to their public insurance coverage last year. The suit helps elderly and disabled people become more mobile. It uses a network of sensors to read signals from the user's brain and helps them to walk by supporting muscle movements.

The robot suit was developed by Cyberdyne, a Japanese venture company established by Yoshiyuki Sankai, a professor at the University of Tsukuba. While 400 of the suits are being used in Japan, care services in Japan are rarely approached from the perspective of reducing demand. Japan also lags behind Germany in deliberations on prevention measures being added to insurance coverage.

There are also many other unused resources related to nursing care and there are also clever ideas emerging in the private sector. Unrealistic labor data offers no helpful solutions to problems related to nursing care, and may even divert attention away from necessary new approaches to thinking about the sector.

(Nikkei)