Nursing Care & Healthcare Business

Mikio Okumura
Nursing Care & Healthcare Business Owner
Director, Managing Executive Officer
(Chairman and Executive Officer of Sompo Care Inc.)

Basic Strategies and Background

The population in Japan is aging rapidly, and it can therefore be expected that the need for nursing care services in this country will continue to grow substantially in the future. At the same time, the gap between the supply and demand of labor for nursing care services is widening, and in 2025 there is anticipated to be a shortage of about 340,000 nursing care professionals. Meanwhile, there is a difference of around 10 years between the average life span in Japan and the so-called healthy life span during which people are living in good health.
The resulting issues pertaining to caring for family members and concerns for post-retirement finances are adding to the various issues faced in Japan’s rapidly aging society.
Sompo Care seeks to help address these issues by enhancing education programs for the development of human resources, embracing ICT and digital technologies to improve productivity, and extending healthy life spans through the prevention of cognitive decline and other means. In the growing senior market, we thus provide services that contribute to the security, health, and wellbeing of both customers that require care and those that do not and help resolve the issues faced by society in order to assist in making “Japan an affluent country that can boast to the world of a long and quality life.”

Progress of the Mid-Term Management Plan

Since commencing full-fledged entry into the nursing care business in fiscal 2015, we have been prioritizing the establishment of the necessary business foundations and corporate governance structures. To this end, we have been developing internal control and compliance systems as well as service systems focused on safety and wellbeing.
We commenced integrated operations of Sompo Care Message and Sompo Care Next in fiscal 2017, working to improve quality and develop human resources as a united Sompo Care Group. These efforts led to increased facility occupancy rates and ultimately higher sales. As a result, adjusted profit in the nursing care & healthcare business reached ¥3.0 billion in fiscal 2017, a massive increase over the previous fiscal year.
In fiscal 2018, we anticipate adjusted profit of ¥4.3 billion in the nursing care & healthcare business as sales continue to rise on the back of increased facility occupancy rates and as the various measures for improving profit margins generate results.

Main Future Initiatives

The nursing care & healthcare business will develop its operations throughout the senior market, which is centered on nursing care, with the goal of helping address a wide range of social issues in the nursing care field and in other areas. In this undertaking, we will step up collaboration between the domestic P&C insurance and the domestic life insurance businesses to exercise the Group’s strengths while leveraging the insight of outside partners through means such as partnerships between public, private, and academic organizations.

Employee Training

The quality Sompo Care seeks to deliver in its nursing care services is something that will need to be realized by enhancing the independence of users, which is the most fundamental mission of nursing care, while developing services that are matched to the needs of users. It is the people serving customers on-site who will be responsible for realizing this quality. At Sompo Care, we hold the Sompo Care Grand Prix Final, an annual forum for presenting information on on-site initiatives and other activities that is open to nursing care service sites across Japan. The goal of this forum is to share information on such activities throughout the organization and thereby increase the quality of our nursing care services.
We also hold annual cooking contests in which each site proposes meals they want to serve users and then prepares them for the competition. Furthermore, we strive to foster the ability of staff to determine the steps required to provide users with pleasing meals and communicate this need in concrete terms. By cultivating such skills, we aim to support the independence of users through food.

Governance

System

In conjunction with the start of integrated operations in fiscal 2017, we bolstered risk management divisions and have been working to spread and entrench awareness of the importance of preventing the reoccurrence of accidents and other incidents affecting the entire company. Also, the Governance, Risk, and Compliance Committee has been set up as an advisory body to the Management Committee in order to help furnish responses to serious incidents pertaining to risk management at the Sompo Care Group and to discuss internal audit results and other internal control-related matters.

Compliance

Sompo Care enacts compliance programs to systematically promote compliance, distributes compliance guidebooks to employees, conducts compliance training, and takes other steps to cultivate compliance knowledge and awareness.
In addition, internal and external reporting venues have been established as a whistleblower system. Reports are quickly investigated to determine the validity of their claims and the necessary response measures are put in place. Cards describing how to contact the venues are supplied to employees to ensure that they are aware of this system.