Starting from this month, the Japanese government will beef up support for nursing care facilities that accept foreign students, in a bid to increase foreign nursing care workers to address the shortage of workforce in these facilities, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.
According to the plan, the government will provide financial aid -- worth about one-third of such expenses as school tuition and rent on housing -- to foreign students who aim to acquire qualifications as certified nursing care workers, with a view to improving the quality of nursing care services by aiding these facilities' efforts to secure a sufficient workforce.
The amount of financial assistance per foreign student will be up to 320,000 yen per year in principle. As the fiscal source of such assistance, the government plans to use funds allocated to secure facilities and workforce in medical and nursing care services.
The fiscal 2018 budget, which passed on Wednesday, included 9 billion yen -- of which 6 billion yen will be shouldered by the central government -- for the financial aid policy. The policy is listed as one of the projects that will be achieved with the use of the funds to secure a sufficient workforce in nursing care services.
In the nursing care service field -- which involves physically hard work -- the workforce has been chronically short. It is expected that the shortage will amount to as many as about 380,000 nursing care workers nationwide in 2025, when all of the baby boomers turn 75 or older.
In light of such circumstances, the government allowed foreign nationals to continue living in Japan if they are engaged in nursing care-related work by adding "nursing care" as a status of residence for foreign nationals in the revised Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law, which came into force in September last year.
Even so, these foreign nationals still need to study for about two years in vocational schools or junior colleges with curriculum for training as certified care workers and obtain the required certification.
The central government currently has a system of extending loans via prefectural governments for the foreign students attending the training institutions, in an effort to finance their school expenses.
However, some foreign students initially are not capable of speaking Japanese even on a daily conversational level and cannot keep up with classes in the training institutions without attending language schools beforehand. In such cases, heavy burdens from school expenses have been a challenge.
Some facilities provide scholarships to foreign students attending Japanese language schools on the condition that they will work for the facilities after obtaining certificates as care workers, aiming to help them pay for school expenses and rent on housing. With the new financial assistance program, the government wants to assist these facilities.
If more facilities begin providing this type of scholarship, foreign nationals with an aspiration to work in Japan will also have the benefit of having more choices in finding employment.
The number of foreign nationals seeking to obtain nursing care-related certificates is on the rise. Many of them are said to be foreign students from Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam.
According to the Japan Association of Training Institutions for Certified Care Workers, a public interest incorporated association, 591 foreign students enrolled in certified nursing worker training institutions in the spring of 2017 -- about 30 times greater than in 2012, when the group began to collect relevant statistics.
The government will also assist efforts by people concerned who solicit excellent human resources from overseas in a bid to accelerate the recent rise in the number of foreign students seeking to work in Japan as certified care workers.
More specifically, the government will partially pay for expenses of support groups that act as liaisons between foreign nationals aiming to study in Japan and nursing care facilities when they hold joint briefings as commissioned projects on behalf of prefectural governments.
Government financial aid will also be paid to people involved in the nursing care sector who visit places such as schools outside of Japan to gather information on people including youth with a desire to go to Japan to work in the sector.
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
