Projects

Working Conditions for Nurses

Improved working conditions and work environments are the utmost concern of nurses in the clinical settings. The positive work conditions and environments are the foundations for safe and reliable healthcare. One of the JNA missions is “Promoting to create the environment in which nurses are able to continue working peacefully throughout their life.” To enable nurses to keep on working, we focus on priorities such as promoting work-life balance, improving working hours, pay, and occupational health and safety.

Education

• Basic education
  JNA believes that basic nursing education is absolutely crucial, as one of the cornerstones for professional nurses. To provide high quality individual nursing care to the people in Japan in coming years, basic nursing education should include both liberal arts and scientific professional subjects. We may attain such quality education only through four-year education. The Japanese people also have high expectations for public health nurses and midwives, so we need to provide graduate education that will live up to those expectations. To these ends, we urges the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and other government agencies to ensure adequate education for nursing professionals.
• Continuing Professional Development（CPD）
  • CPD courses
    We plan and organize CPD courses. The courses we provide is designed to improve essential knowledge and technical skills for nursing practice, administration and education. To offer more opportunities, we provide courses in real time, on-demand and as such.
  • Academic conferences
    We organize the Conferences of the Japan Society of Nursing in collaboration with the prefectural nursing associations to give the members opportunities to present the practice-based research findings and to provide settings for the members to learn from one another through discussions and other such activities. 
• Credentialing
  We run three credentialing systems aimed at improving the quality of nursing practice, which are “certified nurse specialists”, “certified nurses” and “certified nurse administrators”. For more details, please see the “Credentialing” page.

Nursing Services

• Patient safety
  We provide patient safety consultation services, post the latest information on the JNA website and engage in various other activities aimed at providing safe and reliable medical and nursing care for all.
• Database services
  We are developing the database project in an effort to improve work environments for nurses and the quality of nursing. This project intends to contribute to the management of nurse administrators and also utilize it for our policy recommendations.
• Promotion of the role expansion of nurses
  As the demand for healthcare continues to increase rapidly due to Japan’s super-aging society, we will need to provide care more effectively and efficiently in the future, in order to sustain the healthcare system as a whole. The government of Japan is undergoing a fundamental review of the health care delivery system, where nurses will be expected to perform their roles to the fullest extent. Discussion is underway on a system that enables specially trained nurses to perform a certain kinds of medical interventions together with nursing care so that they may better fulfill the patients’ needs. We are trying to get such a system enshrined in law, in order to protect the safety of patients and nurses, and to enable nurses to make the most of their expertise.

Home Healthcare and Long-term Nursing Care

We are expecting to see an increase in the number of people requiring high-level long-term nursing care and elderly people with dementia in the near future. Nursing is set to play an increasingly important role as a result, especially in the area of home based care and long-term nursing care. We urgently need to create a framework that is capable of sustaining home based care on a long-term and continuous basis, even for patients requiring a high level of care or whose families are unable to meet the needs of care. We are keen to promote a new type of combined service that includes home-visit nursing in addition to day services, short-term stay and home visit long-term care services, and are working to strengthen nursing functions in both home-visit nursing and long-term care facilities.

Public Health Nurses

In Japan, public health nursing activities are addressed at the local level by nurses who are qualified as “public health nurses”.

Overview of Japanese Nursing System

Fragmentation and separation of health and welfare administrations has created a system where public health nurses are allocated dispersedly and/ or in task-oriented ways. This has been criticized for having an adverse effect on the activities of public health nurses. There is also a risk that this could undermine the competency of public health nurses, in terms of their ability to effectively handle the increasingly difficult, wide-ranging and complex issues they face at the local level. In an effort to improve this situation, we are working to establish a concrete framework for public health nurses’ activities and to strengthen their capacities.

Midwives

As the number of childbirth facilities continues to fall, improvement of a safe and secure environment for local childbirth services is becoming an urgent priority. JNA works to redress the uneven distribution of the workplaces of midwives and strengthen the competency of midwife, to ensure that all expectant mothers and newborn babies receive the highest quality of care. For more details, please see the “Midwifery in Japan” section.

Midwifery in Japan

International Activities

We are involved in a wide range of international activities, including dissemination of information about Japanese nursing to other countries, exchange activities with the member associations of the International Council of Nurses (ICN) and the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM).

Nursing Now Campaign

Japanese Nursing Association (JNA) and Japan Nursing Federation (JNF) started our collaborative activities on Nursing Now in February 2019. We uphold the theme of “Creating Healthy Society through the Power of Nursing” and run a campaign in Japan.
In Japan, the Government promotes the reform of social security system in response to change in demographic and disease structures due to society of super aging and fewer children. The healthcare system in Japan is greatly changing. This is the shift to community based integrated care system combining healthcare, long-term care and livelihood. Currently, nurses provide care to people living with diseases and disabilities at the site of livelihood, provide care to patients in hospital for treatment and cure, and conduct health promotion activities with community uch as preventing diseases and long-term care. In addition to these roles, nurses are expected to link livelihood to healthcare and social welfare, and to contribute to the creation of healthy society which underpins the livelihood of people living in communities. To take these expected roles and meet the needs of society, some conditions have to be in place such as expansion of nursing education, establishment of healthy working environment which enables nurses to continue working and expansion of the role of nurses to provide care safely and efficiently.
Japanese Nursing Association set our priority policies to tackle these challenges; Promotion of reform of the basic nursing education system; Establishment of a system for nursing service provision in the community based integrated care system; Promotion of work style reform for nurses; and Promotion of the role expansion of nurses and development of human resources for nursing.
The idea of Nursing Now is consistent with our efforts and direction. Maximizing the potential of nurses to perform well in the community based integrated care system will lead to healthy society. To be more involved in the policy development and decision making, it is vital to have more nurses in leadership position. Political power is also required to attain our policy including the establishment of a new system and the amendment of the law. We’d like to run Nursing Now campaign in Japan to heighten the momentum toward meeting social needs with a unified voice of nurses.

Nursing Now Nippon Declaration

The Nursing Now Forum in Japan examined the importance of evidence in policymaking, community activities, and disaster preparedness, response and recovery. It reaffirmed that, regardless of social circumstances, nurses have the power to contribute not only to the health of individual people but also to the fostering of community health culture and to the development of society in general. The activities and practices of nurses are key to the achievement of the global targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Recognizing that nurses need to make more active use of their skills and expertise, we hereby declare that we will continue to work together as follows: