Nursing care sector pins hope on foreign trainees

December 19, 2017

Tokyo- Japan's law governing the vocational training program for foreign workers has been revised, arousing hopes among nursing care service providers that chronic shortages of care workers may be eased.

The Technical Intern Training Program is designed to transfer industrial, agricultural and other skills from Japan to developing countries to support their development.

Under the program, management organizations that serve as hubs for accepting trainees in the program, such as associations of small and midsize companies and other groups, provide trainees from developing countries with Japanese-language lessons and arrange firms where they receive practical vocational training.

The private sector-led program has sometimes been criticized as a cover for the exploitation of inexpensive labor from developing countries.

Under the revised law, aimed at protecting trainees, management organizations need to obtain government permission to be involved in the program in order to make their obligations and responsibilities clearer and host companies are required to submit a training plan for each of them.

As a result of the legal revision, which took effect on Nov. 1, 18-year and older workers can be accepted for training periods of up to five years under the program.

The first trainees under the revised scheme are not expected to arrive in Japan until around February next year, as companies that hope to accept foreign workers under the program need to win approval for their training plans from the Organization for Technical Intern Training, a newly created supervisory authority.

As a feature of the revision, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare requires nursing care service trainees to have minimum Japanese proficiency, understanding spoken slowly conversations in the language, at the time of their arrival in Japan.

Under the revamped law, care service facilities will be required to have Japanese care workers as instructors for trainees.

If a foreign worker is trained for six months at a home for the elderly in need of special care because of dementia or other health problems, he or she may be counted as a care worker at the home. The rule is a boon for operators of special elderly nursing care homes as they are required to have a full-time care or nursing worker for each three residents.

The nursing care service industry faces a chronic shortage of workers due to factors such as low wages despite demanding workloads. The average ratio of effective job offers to seekers stood at 3.02 in the sector in 2016, or 302 job offers for every 100 job seekers, much higher than the average of 1.36 for all industries.

As the nursing care industry is projected to face a shortage of about 380,000 workers in 2025, care service home operators are pinning high hopes on the training program.

"We are expecting much from the training program," Kaoru Sasaki, deputy head of the national association of group homes for demented people, said. "We have to rely on it because of worker shortages."

A social welfare corporation in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan, which operates care facilities for the elderly in need of special care and demented people, is considering accepting around five foreign trainees.

But there are concerns that trainees' Japanese proficiency may not be adequate to maintain essential communication for care of the aged sufficiently. The welfare ministry therefore plans to introduce a set of measures to help them learn Japanese, including lessons via the Internet. Jiji Press