Aki-Essays: nurse essay (3-16-09)

I still remember the high demand for nurses and the incentives of high salaries, while being in difficulty finding a position as a radiographer in 1998, 11 years ago. As I was engaging in the search browsing a weekly job magazine, the pages for medical workers were brimming over with the ads of hospitals or clinics looking for nurses and other kinds of professionals.

Although the Japanese media have been saying that doctors are in short supply and certain hospitals have been closed as a result, surviving medical facilities need additional nurses.

Tokyo is small, actually. Even during my customary jogging, a number of medical facilities every once in a while piqued my interest by showing an ad with “Need Nurses,” like one on a bulletin board near the building. Meanwhile, near the Higashi-jujo rail station in the suburb of Kita ward, the huge building of years-closed Higashi Jujo Hospital has been cordoned off with steel/metal fences.

The nurse shortage phenomenon will likely linger due to the overall graying of the country: the number of births was about two million a year in the secondary baby boom (1971-1974) and had dropped to about one million in 2008; the decreasing rate of the population increase fell in the red in 2005. The more elderly people, the higher demand for nurses.

But in the ongoing slow economy and with the growing jobless population, there must be some facts which dissuade those job-seekers from turning into nurses.

To begin with looking into how Japanese women find jobs, the situation stands at odds: while men are dominant in number in companies, almost all nurses are women. In companies, regular employees were composed of men for 71.6% and women for 28.4% in 2007 (while part-timers were made of men for 26.5% and women for 73.5%.) On the other hand, nurses included men for 4.7% and separately male practical nurses for 6.1% as of the end of 2006.

In analyzing the data about companies, marriage seems to play a part. Still typically in Japan, after marriage female workers opt to leave the office to spend time with their child/children. In the case of quitting a job, some years after marriage some of them can afford to join a company as a full-time employee, but sadly in fact most Japanese companies don’t hire regular workers midway: For 62.1% of companies not-right-after-school job-seekers had been able to just apply, according to the census released in 2006. Meanwhile, female job-seekers have no choices but part-time positions and indeed the sort of jobs is often considered to be useful to support household finances as some of them are wives still rearing a child/children, given more flexible and shorter working hours.

On the front of nurses, there were about 810 thousand nurses and 380 thousand practical nurses as of the end of 2006. However, a different blog puts the total number of nurses at 1.2 million, which includes 550 thousand latent nurses who just hold the license. Such a huge number of license-possessors likely also stems from the need to raise a child/children, a responsibility which requires time, attention and efforts.

No doubt, the nurse is a responsible profession, facing and dealing with patients, handling a variety of chemicals, as a single mistake could lead to a serious consequence. The heavy responsibility might elicit some antipathy from potential nurses.

For the contemporarily active nurses, to regularly come to the medical facility, keep concentration and engage in teamwork with colleagues is integral to maintain the quality of their service. Indeed, some part-time nurses I have seen evoked the posture of a secretary, just standing next to the doctor in the room for a considerable space of time each day. Meanwhile, I have also seen regular nurses who resumed working after an off-duty period of some years.

There must be some women who want to come back to societal functions as a regular worker after marriage and quitting a company. In order to meet such their demands and confront the aging society, the position of a nurse must be a legitimate option. Yet besides three or four years of schooling, the tuition fees must also be a concern to ponder on. The government may better consider subsidizing school fees to produce more nurses.

In the event of the subsidization taking effect, male job-seekers can also be a recipient as the male population between jobs is increasingly being a problem. Men actually have significant potential to reverse the entrenched preconception of a nurse as women’s calling and cope with the aging society. (It’s a shame of Japan that the image of a nurse often becomes the subject of men’s, or male otakus’/geeks’, sex-related activities. [?])

Although if in a hospital a gender group is closer to another in size, more sophisticated dynamics may be an additional burden on nurses than when female nurses are predominantly many, the male nurse seems a prospective profession to help alleviate the dearth of nurses.

In my opinion, nurses’ working environment seems to have high potential to demonstrate good work sharing. Currently, each nurse tends to work overtime receiving extra wages, though, at the moment they should be able to reduce working hours and income to allow other nurses to start working. This is a form of effort to bring the economy upward and tackle the aging society. [?] In addition, easing prerequisites for foreign nurses like ones from the Philippines and Indonesia will also invite new members to the nurse section. As for working with foreign nurses, there just is a concern that they need to make extra effort to cross the language barrier while meeting norms.

According to my experiences, medical facilities in residential areas tend to employ nurses from the neighborhood, including those who haven’t worked as a nurse for some years. Due to this background some of them seem to lack a sense of professionalism and social skills.

Yet for nurses committed to taking care of patients on the local level, occasional contacts with more seasoned nurses, who deal with more difficult cases at a larger medical facility, are essential, giving them opportunities to learn skills including social ones and helping keep up with technical upgrades. Alongside, to participate in lectures and/or studies must give them not only new info but chances to meet experts or reps in a certain field.

On such an occasion, a practice of social manners through an actual exchange of words with hosts, some of whom are in white-collar positions, must help local nurses keep their workplace attitude correct, especially for the time when business people are the patients to deal with, whose daytime population is smaller in residential areas.

Besides nurses who have moved from larger medical facilities to more localized ones, if there are nurses who used to do jobs separate from medication, however, their experiences may play a role in instilling such social skills and sorts of topical knowledge into other nurses and getting them to be level with patients from multiple social positions.

May I put on a nurse uniform?