Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Japanese society is facing a super aged society. Those aged over 65+ was recorded as 27.4% in 2017, consequently Japan is facing a serious shortage of housing for the elderly, even though the number of aged single and couple households without informal care has been dramatically increasing. Elderly housings with care service (EHwC) in Japan have provided since 2011 to compensate for the shortage of housing for the elderly. After then the supply quantity of this housing has increased rapidly but covered the broad range of qualities. At first the main targets of residents were the elderly with able bodies, but the large proportion of residents are the elderly who are in the waiting lists of nursing home. To grasp the current situations and points at issue, I administered questionnaire to all EHwC in Tokyo and Osaka, the two biggest country councils in Japan in 2017. We distributed a total of 817 questionnaires to all housing and received back 172, 21.0% being the valid response rate. The following points became clear. 1) 70% of the housing has experienced the treatment of terminal care and deathwatch. 2) 60% of the housing has responded that they could accept the residents suffering from dementia, however some of them showed difficulties. In 2018, I conducted a case study of twenty housing facilities about the treatment of the elderly suffering from dementia. I discuss the ways those facilities try to accept and support dementia residents.