Yasuo Takagi, Professor, Dean of the Graduate School of Health Management

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Graduate School of Health Management, which was established in April 2005 as a platform for cross-functional and interdisciplinary research in health and longevity. The graduate school regards the state of being “healthy” and “unhealthy” not as two opposing concepts but as being continuous. In order to transition from the intuition and experience-based healthcare of the past to one that is more scientific, the school has so far focused on analyzing and making use of data related to health and medical care. However, the issue of health and longevity is gaining greater interest within society as the generation of Japanese baby boomers will represent the older population by 2025. Bearing this in mind, the graduate school has decided to embark on new initiatives that look ahead to the next ten years.

Up until recently, the Course for Nursing and the Course for Health Care Management offered two degrees: Master of Science in Nursing and Master of Science in Health Management. It has now been revised so that the Course for Health Care Management and Course for Sports Management now offer a Master of Science in Health Care Management and a Master of Science in Sports Management respectively, plus the new addition of the Public Health Program, which awards a Master of Science in Public Health upon completion of all required credits. The curriculum for the Certified Nurse Specialist (CNS) Course in the Course for Nursing will also be enhanced. The revisions to the degree names were made because the existing names did not clearly express the student’s specialist field and, especially with more graduate schools offering courses in health care management, sports management, and public health in the last ten years, there was an increasing necessity to clarify the students’ expertise, which will lead them to greater career opportunities within and outside Japan.

One of the new initiatives at the graduate school is the “+10 (plus ten)” project led by Associate Professor Yuko Oguma. As part of the project, public lectures and fitness classes are held in collaboration with our local area, Fujisawa City, and the Fujisawa City Health and Medical Foundation. The name “+10” refers to “adding ten-minutes physical activity to your daily life as the first step,” and endorses the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s Physical Activity Guideline for Health Promotion (Active Guide). Regular physical activity reduces various health risks, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, depression, and dementia. We are promoting these initiatives, and in recognition of our efforts, our research got funded by the Health and Labour Sciences Research Grant in 2014. Our research is on “the development of intervention methods for the prevention of cognitive decline through community-wide physical activity campaigns.” This is a three-year research project that aims to make new discoveries in preventing cognitive decline, and we are hoping to put our findings into use by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.