The population of Isehara City in 2017 is 100,561 with 25.05% being aged 65 and over. In 2022 its population is expected to decrease to 97,000 while the percentage of 65 and above will rise to 28.0%. As ageing progresses in this way, the City is expected to provide an increasing amount of services for the elderly.
To cope with this, Isehara City is implementing various measures based on its principle of “Isehara, where people can live long happily and in good health, with everyone’s caring support.” To achieve this, we have set three objectives: “building a welfare community of mutual support, establishing a preventive nursing care system, and providing reliable welfare and nursing services.”
We are emphasizing the following four measures: establishing a community-based care system, protection of people with dementia, enabling seniors to find meaning in their lives and to become socially active, and achieving good coordination between home medical care and nursing care. To actualize these, we are providing measures responding to seniors’ specific needs, such as mapping out of “a care pathway for dementia in the community.”
For the elderly to continue to live in their familiar places, it is important to provide medical and nursing care, and welfare services in a cross sectional way, so we are also building a framework for this.
In order to make Isehara City more age-friendly and to extend residents’ healthy life expectancy, we are collaborating with Kanagawa Prefecture which promotes initiatives to “improve ME-BYO” and with neighboring municipalities. Also, we will listen to the needs of the elderly, the opinions of residents and experts, and reflect these factors on our policies. And by linking our age-friendly projects with the City’s comprehensive plan, we will practice age-friendly projects in wider fields.
(ME-BYO: Rather than regarding health and illness as being mutually exclusive, the concept of ME-BYO views a person’s mental and physical condition as continuously changing along a spectrum between health and illness).