Japan Press Weekly

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2014 September 10 - 16 [LABOR]

Medical workers’ unions demand doubling the number of nurses

The Japan Federation of Medical Workers’ Unions (Iroren) held a press conference at the welfare ministry on September 8, announcing its proposal that the number of nursing staff in Japan should be doubled as soon as possible.

The total number of hospital and home-visit nurses in Japan is about 1.5 million as of 2011. Iroren’s officials stressed that nurses’ working conditions have increasingly been worsening due to chronic shortages of nurses in the rapidly aging society.

A survey on nurses’ working conditions conducted by Iroren in 2013 shows that 73.6% of the respondents feel tired all the time. More than half of the respondents say that they have difficulty in providing adequate services to patients and approximately 80% of them say this is because they are suffering from overwork resulting from staff shortages. The percentage of respondents who want to quit their jobs reached 75.2%.

Iroren calculated the number of nurses required (about three million) based on certain conditions such as raising the ratio of nursing staff to inpatients to at least 1:4 and limiting work hours to 32 hours a week.

Iroren Chair Nakano Chikako noted that her organization will further strengthen movements to improve nurses’ work conditions so that they can continue working.

Iroren’s member unions on September 6 launched a nationwide campaign to call for a drastic increase in the number of medical and nursing-care workers. They are to take various actions across the country through the end of November, such as signature-collecting drives and petitioning local authorities.

Past related article:
> More than 70% of nurses consider resigning due to chronic fatigue: union survey [February 4, 2014]