TOKYO – The authorities in Japan have announced to ease the criteria for nursing care facilities to employ foreign technical trainees.
Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare announced on Wednesday its intention to revise regulations to facilitate the employment of foreign technical trainees in nursing care facilities, starting as early as fiscal 2025.
Presently, only nursing care facilities operational for more than three years are eligible to hire foreign workers under Japan’s technical intern trainee program.
Under the proposed changes, facilities may hire foreign workers even if they have not met the three-year operational requirement, provided the organizations managing them were established over three years ago.
Facilities whose operators were established less than three years ago may also employ foreign trainees if they fulfill specific conditions, such as conducting training programs for foreign talent.
Japan also plans to broaden the scope of foreign workers eligible to provide home-visit nursing care services. This expansion would include technical trainees, workers holding specified skills visas, and candidates for certified care worker status from countries with economic partnership agreements (EPAs) with Japan, provided they complete the required induction training.
As a standard practice, only individuals with nursery care visa status and certified care workers from EPA countries can engage in home-visit care under existing regulations.
Japan is currently facing a labor crisis and a birth crisis at the same time. As far as the statistics are concerned, Japan’s foreign population hit a new high of over 3.4 million in 2023, while the number of Japanese citizens fell by 595,000 people from a year earlier to 124,352,000 as of Oct 1, declining for the 13th straight year.
Japan’s birth crisis has skyrocketed in recent years, triggering the government to launch an official dating app to help people get married and start families. The decision was taken after the country witnessed record-low birth and marriage rates. The latest data released by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare showed Japan only recorded 727,277 births last year.
