Upon Establishing the Global Nursing Research Center (GNRC)

 With a falling birthrate and a super-aging society, Japan is in need of a paradigm shift that will move it away from a 'medical care that cures' toward a 'medical care that supports.' To extend a healthy life expectancy for its people, it will be necessary for Japan to face its forthcoming challenges and bring about the realization of a 'care' society that lightens the difficulty of the living and brings a self-reliant way of life to the Japanese nation. It can be said that nursing, which plays a central role in providing 'care,' must develop into a new field as a science for the realization of a 'care' society because our society has a population structure unlike any we have experienced thus far in the world, and we must also respond to both globalization and diversification.

  Currently, however, the dominant paradigm utilized in various nursing fields embraces a structure that supports the training of clinical nurses, not the developing of a science that seeks to examine a 'medical and nursing care that supports.' It is therefore necessary to promote research into a transdisciplinary innovative nursing science that systematizes this type of 'care.' In particular, it is essential "to create a transdisciplinary research and educational environment that fosters young leaders in nursing research that will promote care innovation."

 In order to achieve this, we must work toward integrating nursing with fields it has yet to fully collaborated with, such as bio-engineering, molecular biology, information science, and policy science. Moreover, it will also be important to strengthen human resource development so as to promote this transdisciplinary research. That is to say, the aim is to create a long-term research system that allows young researchers to conduct transdisciplinary work that ranges from fundamental research to studies with commercial application. Moreover, it is becoming more important to collaborate among industry, government, and academia. Thus, the Global Nursing Research Center will be established as an affiliated research center, which is the first one in Nursing science. The GNRC will seek to execute the following three goals.

1) To establish an innovative nursing research field based on transdisciplinary integration;
2) To carry out leading-edge research and present it to the world with young researchers pursuing the sciences;
3) To build up the foundation of these new fields through repeated research trials that will strengthen the new research and education systems.

 The GNRC will take on a leading role in the development of Nursing science throughout the world since Japan is facing an unprecedented future, namely, a super-aging society with a falling birthrate. We would be most grateful if not only other researchers but also many people throughout society come to support our activities as a training center designed to develop young researchers able to play a central role in Japan and the world.

Thank you.