Keita Yamauchi Laboratory: Fostering "Multilinguals"

Health Science and Pathophysiology (Psychiatry), Health Policy and Management, and the history of Juku

Japan's healthcare system is now at a major turning point, driven by factors such as a declining birthrate and an aging population. There is a demand to provide high-quality services equitably within the constraints of limited financial and human resources. Moreover, it is necessary to provide a variety of services in optimal combinations tailored to the needs of each individual. Achieving these goals depends on the integration and reorganization of the system, encompassing not only medical care but also the adjacent fields of public health and welfare. However, this presents challenges unique to the medical field.

Professionals such as doctors and nurses are trained in self-contained educational programs, which tends to confine them to the specific "language" and perspectives of their own professions. On the other hand, experts in fields such as management often struggle to understand the unique characteristics and problems of the clinical setting. In other words, the difficulty lies in the inability of these respective experts to share a common "language."

To overcome this situation, there is a critical need for individuals who can re-examine public health, medical care, and welfare as an integrated whole within society, drawing not only on their specific areas of expertise but also on their experience in clinical settings. Moreover, they must be able to share a "language" with experts from various fields—in other words, they must be "multilingual." Therefore, we aim to foster individuals who can demonstrate broad leadership as "multilinguals" across a wide range of fields, from hospitals and long-term care facilities to healthcare, health, and sports-related businesses.

The Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care of Keio University has significant strengths. It is a comprehensive university with low barriers between its faculties. Furthermore, through activities such as student clubs, you can build lifelong connections with Keio students from various faculties, faculty and staff, and Keio University alumni (alumni). It is precisely through interacting with such a diverse group of people that you can cultivate communication skills that transcend your own specialty and cross into multiple fields, and this is the key to becoming "multilingual."

During my own time as a student at School of Medicine, I commuted to the Mita campus for club activities in between my classes and practical training at Shinanomachi. Through these activities, I was also fortunate to have opportunities to interact closely with faculty members from the Mita campus, including those in Faculty of Business and Commerce and Faculty of Letters. Being in such an environment naturally led me to shift my focus toward the field that connects medicine and society.

Because issues surrounding healthcare are so close to our daily lives, there is always a risk that discussions about them will become overly emotional. What is important is the ability to view oneself and the subject matter objectively and to avoid being confined by the perspectives inherent to one's own specialty or profession. To do so, one must cherish a spirit of skepticism—a willingness to question not only one's own ideas and preconceptions but also established concepts and theories, and to re-analyze them scientifically from a broad perspective. The spirit of independence, which Keio University has cherished since Yukichi Fukuzawa, means that by possessing the pride of an independent individual, one can maintain the intellectual freedom to hold a spirit of skepticism, unswayed by established authority or popular trends. I hope that our Keio students will firmly carry on this spirit and mindset.