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I needed to take my mother, who is over 80 years old, to the hospital the other day. She could no longer move due to her rheumatoid arthritis and—even though I did not expect a cure for her condition—I wanted to consult a colleague to see if there was a way to improve her condition so that at least she could maintain her daily routine until her final moments.
My mother lives on one of those difficult-to-access mountainsides typical of Nagasaki. She has to climb up stairs along a hill to get to her house. When she was young, this was no problem, but recently, she needs to stop frequently to rest and can barely make it to her home. Even going to the hospital takes a lot effort. I asked her if she wanted to move to a place with easy access to transportation services or into a good nursing home with ample privacy, but she refused as she wanted to stay in a familiar place surrounded by people she knew.
When my mother could no longer move, we hired a nursing-care service. It would have been both physically and mentally challenging for my wife and I to live with her to take care of her, so we asked the service to visit twice a week for some cleaning and shopping.
Fortunately, my mother's symptoms improved and she was able to resume her daily routine. She currently lives by herself in her house mid-way up the hill and the nursing-care service makes regular visits. However, this situation will probably not last for long and we will have to consider the next step.
The situation my aging mother and I find ourselves in is probably not uncommon.
The average life expectancy for Japanese people is 80 years for men, and 86 years for women. It is doubtful that just living longer makes for a happy life. Healthy life expectancy, where a person can live an independent healthy life without need for nursing care or without being bedridden with an illness, is estimated at 70 years for men and 74 years for women. In other words, many elderly people in Japan may find themselves in a situation where they will require some form of daily-life support or nursing care during the last years of their lives; 10 years for men, and 12 years for women.
We need to seriously address the realities of our aging society. The Future Medical Research Staff Training Center Project aims not only to improve medical care in the narrow sense, but also to train general practitioners who understand the lives of the elderly, and can help them maintain their daily routines by combining medical care, welfare and nursing care. To that end, we provide undergraduate and postgraduate training to students with the collaboration of physicians, nurses, caregivers, and social workers from all those areas of specialization. We will also be working in conjunction with Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University, a school with a long standing reputation for the training of social workers. In addition, graduate courses will be established in collaboration with Nagasaki Harbor Medical Center City Hospital for the training of physicians and healthcare workers who will study and solve the problems inherent to an aging society.
As a result of these efforts, we would like to build a society where people can truly say that they were happy to be alive even though they may have needed nursing care support during the last 10 years of their lives. Our mission is to once again be attentive to the protection of a person's dignity.
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