Japan's biggest nursing union has called on the government to address a worrying staff shortage that it claims is responsible for the fact that two in three of its members have filed an accident report in the past year.
The All Japan Prefectural and Municipal Workers Union said that 62.7% of the 5227 nurses it surveyed had made a mistake or reported a near accident. Among the errors were mix-ups of medicines, dropping patients, and confusing records.
According to the study, almost half of the nurses were unable to follow hospital guidelines because they were too busy. The survey—announced during a 600 strong demonstration to mark national nurses day—follows a series of high profile incidents, some of which have caused deaths.
Among the most recent was the death of a patient with cancer earlier this year after he was given eight times the prescribed dose of his medication. [AF checking] The nurses union said that the high number of incident and accident reports was a consequence of the shortage of nurses.
"Although the ideal is to have a nurse tend two or three patients at a time, the reality is that nurses in Tokyo are tending four or five patients on average, and at some institutions as many as 20," union member Masao Akimoto told reporters.
According to Motoko Okumura of the Japanese Nursing Association, Japan has fewer nurses than in most other developed countries. She said that there are 55.7 nurses per 10 000 population in Japan, compared with 102.6 in Sweden and 81.4 in the United States. The ratio is lower in Britain, at 41.5, but the problem is compounded in Japan because of the large number of beds. Japan has 132 beds per 10 000 people, compared with 45 in the United Kingdom.
With Japan's population ageing faster than any other in the world, the shortage of caregivers threatens to become more acute. To try to head off a crisis, the government introduced a new elderly care scheme in April, and the ruling Liberal Democratic party is still investigating whether to allow more immigration to top up the nursing profession (25 March, p 825).