In 2017 the population of Yugawara Town is 25,600, of which 38.6% will be people aged 65 and over. In 2025, this ratio is estimated to grow to 47.9% of 65 years old in the population of 23,141. It is expected that there will be more households of the elderly living alone, married elderly couples and elderly with dementia.
To cope with this trend, Yugawara Town is implementing measures to realize its vision, “Providing appropriate support to enable the elderly to live independently in a super-aged society”, based on its principle, “Creating a town where the elderly can feel safe and fulfilment.”
To actualize our vision and principle, we are promoting measures in two areas: one is for the elderly with dementia. We are building up a support system which can diagnose dementia at an early stage and give an appropriate treatment, and a neighborhood network to watch over the elderly with dementia, so that they can live safely in their familiar places.
The other is to strengthen coordination between home medical care and nursing care, and to enable the elderly in need of medical care to receive it at home or their familiar places, while retaining their lifestyles. This will be possible with a wide range of coordination such as post-discharge support and sharing medical care information given at home among related organizations.
Yugawara Town is located in the Western Area of Kanagawa Prefecture where the municipalities have a close relationship historically and geographically. Kanagawa Prefectural Government designated this area as a “strategic area for improvement of ME-BYO” and has promoted the projects to revitalize this area in order to extend healthy life expectancy of the residents and visitors through improvement of ME-BYO.
In order to make Yugawara Town more age-friendly, we will join the projects collaborating with Kanagawa Prefectural Government and other municipalities in this area and aim to extend healthy life expectancy of Yugawara Town. Also, we will listen to the needs of the elderly, the opinions of residents as well as medical, healthcare and welfare experts, and reflect these factors on policies. And by linking them with the comprehensive plan of Yugawara Town, we will implement age-friendly projects in various 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).