Japan recruits Australian nurses for their elderly

Japan faces a nursing shortage with  the world’s oldest population but not enough young people to help care for them.

Now Japan is loosening up its immigration policies and turning to foreign nurses to help make up for that deficit.

A news report by Jason Srother claims that in May 2009, around 300 trained nurses and caregivers from the Philippines will arrive in Japan and begin working at hospitals and homes for the elderly.

But their recruitment, which is allowed under a free-trade agreement Tokyo signed with Manila three years ago, has come under fire from the Japan Nursing Association.

It says the Filipinos might not have sufficient training or understanding of Japanese culture to work as caregivers. Plus, it says, they will take jobs away from skilled Japanese nurses.

Many of the imported workers may wind up doing basic care-giving jobs in nursing homes such as bathing and feeding patients. The pay for this work will far exceed that of trained nurses working in the Philippines, but many labor analysts say most Japanese do not want this type of low-paying, low-skilled job.

Martin Schultz, senior economist at the Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, says Japan needs its young workforce in higher paying professions, to increase the tax base that goes to support senior citizens.
 
“Japan’s society has a major aging problem, this means there needs to be services for aged people. This is usually not a high-wage, high-productivity sector, in many countries this sector is covered by immigration, by low-wage immigrants,” he said.

But Japanese nurses are not the only ones who are cautious about inviting Filipinos to work there.

Marian Tanizaki is director of the Philippines Center, a support group for migrant workers in Tokyo. She worries that Filipino nurses will have few opportunities to advance their careers in Japan and just be regarded as cheap labor.

If Japan’s experiment in allowing foreign nurses to work here does not work out, there may be other options in a few years.

The government is supporting research to create highly skilled, care-giving robots that could start working at nursing homes within five years.