The Future of Rehabilitation Work for the Aged / 日本農村医学会雑誌

ABSTRACT

In January 2004, a panel of experts (chairman Satoshi Ueda) commissioned by the Health and Welfare Bureau for the Elderly, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, came up with an idea suggesting a direction the nation’s rehabilitation project for the aged should take in the future. This has rekindled the debate over the way the rehabilitation work for the old people should be carried out the inevitable subject of discussion that had been taken place on and off since the nursing care insurance system came into being.We have been involved in the rehabilitation of those people mainly with the after-effects of strokes since the early 1960’s when the Japanese government embarked on the rehabilitation project for the elderly.In this paper, we examined our ways of grappling with the task of rehabilitation for the aged people in retrospect. At the same time, from the standpoint of the philosophy that the rehabilitation work for the aged should be aimed at recovering their mental and physical functions to improve their quality of life, we envisioned the future of the rehabilitation project for the old people with stress placed on the following two points(1) the working on a rehabilitation program for the aged after the model of the international classification of functioning, disability and health ; and(2) the building up of a community-based rehabilitation system interlocked with an overall program for the promotion of health care, welfare and security in the local community.