Dementia Patients Go To Work
I read about this interesting story in the Japan Today online English news site. In Chiba Prefecture, elderly people in long-term care facilities are going to work at convenience stores that are struggling to find staff due to Japan's acute labor shortage.
In 2018, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced that users of care services would be allowed to engage in "paid volunteer" activities. The program was started under the Nanashoku (Seven Color) Project, jointly launched by care providers and convenience store owners to encourage dementia suffers to engage socially and to add work to their weekly schedule. The participants work during times set aside for recreational activities at their care facilities.
With the support of a caregiver from the facility, patients in their 60's to 90's with mild dementia, engage in work such as stacking shelves and sanitizing shopping baskets, but not waiting on customers, at convenience stores. They work one hour shifts and earn a 1,000 yen shopping voucher for every three shifts they work.
In Fukuoka Prefecture, care patients deliver direct mail within walking distance for Yamato Transport Co. In Tokyo, Days BLG! began a program nine years ago to allow its users to place flyers in mailboxes and wash cars at dealerships.
I think this is a great idea. It gives people with mild dementia a chance to feel useful and have an opportunity for social interaction. Some of the comments to the JT story complained that this was slave labor and other negative things. It doesn't appear that the care patients are forced to do this. One hour shifts under the supervision of a care giver seems safe and it sounds like people enjoy the work. What do you think about this?
5 comments:
Pamela: I think this is an amazing idea, I know many people who have mild dementia, they are able to do all kinds of work and activities.
God Bless Japan for this wonderful idea.
Catherine
What a wonderful idea and generous of the shop keepers too. It gives the patients the opportunity to feel useful which is so important as their other roles in life diminish.
Social participation, activities, and the joy of being depended on by someone.
I think these will take care of the care patient's mind and body. Of course, it should not be forced.
I think it's a happy project if everyone is connected with the desire to participate.
It sounds like a good thing with everyone profiting - the care patients get some social interaction and engagement, and it helps ease the labour shortage too.
I think it is important to create a society where everyone can be included and take an active part.
Another question is how to value everyone's contribution.
If a lazy and discourteous teenager is paid 1.000Yen per hour, why should a hardworking and courteous, albeit slow, demented person only be paid a third of that?
In Sweden this would probably be seen as slave labour and misuse. There was a case in Sweden some years ago when the staff at a hamburger shop asked some children who had bought and eaten hamburgers outside to pick up the litter (their own and others'). They were offered a free hamburger if they did. This was widely criticised in the press and seen as child slavery! No one under the age of 13 is allowed to work.
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