Approach regarding human resource shortages in the field of medical healthcare
There are two major aspects of the shortage of personnel at medical care facilities: first, there is a dearth in the absolute number of healthcare workers; the second is the uneven distribution per location. To resolve these issues, Medley is working on developing a human resource platform tailored to the field of medical and nursing care, called JobMedley. We have incorporated the following approaches into JobMedley's business model.
Shortage in absolute terms
In the medical healthcare industry, a shortage of personnel exists, and this shortage is observed regardless of region and is seen for all medical/healthcare service providers. For example, let's consider the number of physicians. In terms of the number of clinicians per 1,000 individuals using population data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)*1, Japan ranks 28th out of 36 countries. Japan is ranked at the bottom among G7 countries, and there are only 2.4 clinicians per 1,000 individuals. This shortage in absolute numbers has most hospitals constantly concerned about the shortage of physicians.
This shortage of personnel is not limited to physicians, with the issue having long existed for almost all healthcare professionals, including nurses, nursing care professionals/helpers, and childcare workers. Because of this chronic shortage of personnel, healthcare professionals are forced to work long hours or work extremely hard. Consequently, career planning and managing both work and child and nursing care have become more difficult, resulting in a vicious circle of increased staff turnover at medical care facilities and increasing shortages in personnel.
How, then, can we circumvent this vicious circle? We believe that one important step to solve this issue is “supporting a return to work after taking a break from the job” for those who are qualified but not working at present. In the field of medical healthcare, women play a significant role. However, after women leave the workplace for a certain period of time due to changes in the stages of life, such as marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare, there are many who are unable to return to work because of difficulties in finding a workplace where they can work for short periods of time or owing to concerns and doubts about being able to keep abreast with changes in technologies and products used in the workplace.
On JobMedley, a large number of job openings in workplaces are published, where employees can choose their work style according to changes in the stages of their lives, such as those involving childcare support and shortened working hours, as well as in workplaces that are working hard to improve the educational environment for employees returning to work, to make it easier for these people to return to work. However, employers cannot afford to spend a significant amount for such personnel recruitment efforts. Therefore, to attract a wide range of job postings from all over Japan, JobMedley strives to keep hiring costs as low as possible compared to industry standards to make it easier to post job offers. Therefore, in the medical care industry, the number of businesses that use this service is one of the largest in Japan, and accordingly, we ultimately support the return of numerous employees to work.
Uneven distribution in cities
In the medical healthcare industry, the uneven distribution of personnel in cities has accelerated with the increase in professional freedom to make individual decisions for work. When one searches for jobs using various search platforms, the job postings from institutions in cities are immediately in plain sight and it is difficult to notice jobs at rural sites that have greater issues with shortages in personnel. If the various institutions adopt the traditional "waiting for applications" approach and do not take any new steps, the downward spiral will only worsen. There is a need to create a "space" where postings from a majority of medical and nursing care facilities are noticeable regardless of the name value and location of the facility, and where each facility can engage in active efforts to recruit.
Under these circumstances, we established a recruitment platform that allows direct recruitment through JobMedley so that each institution can attract personnel nationwide by communicating their attractiveness in their own words.
JobMedley was launched with particular focus on the medical field; however, there was successive focus and expansion, and the service, now also covering dental, nursing, childcare, and other healthcare fields, has grown in a big way such that it is used by more than 170,000 locations. We will continue to expand our services to support the matching of many more job applicants and those searching for personnel.
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