Message from the COE Leader

St. Luke's College of Nursing
Hiroko Komatsu
Program Leader

With the advancement of science and technology, our life has become increasingly affluent and convenient. Concurrently, this advancement has brought the transformation of our society and provided diversified choices for individual lifestyles. Such social transformation has a tremendous influence on our experience with birth, aging, illness and death. Healthcare problems of society today have become increasingly complex; for instance, people are faced with an overwhelming variety of choices due to the advancement of medical technologies; individuals suffering from chronic illness have to go through a number of treatment settings over a prolonged period of time to cope with their illness; and there are people who are not entitled to exercise their potential or rights due to social bias, and therefore have limited access to adequate healthcare. These healthcare problems need to be addressed with a matter of urgency, as problems relevant to us all.

St. Luke's College of Nursing 21st Century COE Program focuses on healthcare problems relevant to society in its entirety, aiming to create nursing science for people-centered initiatives in health promotion based on the principle of learning from unique individual experience as manifested in various lifestyles, values and beliefs. The key features of this program are partnership and collaboration with the general public. Our goals are to:

1. develop practical quality nursing services based on a person's perspective;
   
2. deliver such nursing services worldwide as health information and through e-learning to people that are actual caretakers of their own health;
   
3. develop nursing services evaluated by people as clients;
   
4. develop policy recommendations and new research themes.

In short, we seek to establish a foundation of new science of nursing practice with people-centered initiatives, which deeply promotes the collection, coordination and dissemination of evidence, the application, and the quality assessment of nursing service. This program is to be promoted through mutual relations with the adjacent St. Luke's International Hospital and St. Luke's Institute of Life Sciences with regard to education, research and practice. We believe that interaction with communities including the Chuo Ward and other wards in Tokyo will be a major driving force of this program. We further believe that a key to the success of this program lies in communication with people not only in Japan, but also with the global community, through our website.