Since 2010, Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Nursing (FON) and Kobe University’s Graduate School of Health Science (GSHS) have enjoyed a wide-ranging partnership that involves many eminent faculty members. It began with a lecture on aging in Thailand as well as a chapter, “International Health Science in Thailand” by visiting Assoc. Prof. Dr. Duangruedee Lasuka in the Graduate School’s Global Health in Asia, published in 2012.
A student exchange for masters’ students from the GSHS and the FON began in 2012, and such exchanges continue to this day. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Punpilai Sriarporn accompanied the initial group of FON exchange students, and on this visit she discovered mutual research interests with the head of the GSHS at the time, Prof. Dr. Hiroya Matsuo. They consequently collaborated on comparative research on perimenstrual symptoms among college students, as well as on adolescent sexual risk behaviors in Thailand and Japan. Research on the latter involved Kobe masters’ students and other FON faculty members; this was an area of particular interest due to the differences in attitudes towards sexual health research between the two countries. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Punpilai notes that this collaboration between Kobe University and FON CMU, two leading research institutions in their respective regions, led to invaluable knowledge exchange regarding teen sexual behaviors, STI prevention, and health promotion for youth in both Thailand and Japan.
In 2014, Dean Wipada and a group of administrators visited Kobe to discuss further collaboration between the schools. Kobe University co-sponsored the Faculty of Nursing international conference in 2016 and played a key role in the conference’s success.
More recent collaborative work with Kobe University involves an exploration of elder care practices in Kobe and Chiang Mai. With a growing elderly population that is expected to account for 20 percent of the population by 2021, Thailand has much to gain from the prudent consolidation and enhancement of elderly care health systems. Connecting with a “super-aged” society like Japan, in which people over the age of 65 currently account for 28 percent of the population, what would be the potential areas for knowledge sharing between these two contexts?
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Decha Tamdee set out to explore this question in collaboration with the GSHS’s Dr Chieko Greiner along with four other Japanese and Thai academics, focusing on elderly care and family caregiver stress with data collected from participants in both Chiang Mai and Kobe. The study resulted in the development of three publications: one concentrating on the Chiang Mai data (published in January of this year in the Journal of Health Research), another on Kobe, and a third comparing the two data sets. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Decha explains how, from the Thai side, some key lessons learned from the Japanese experience related to how to develop, advocate for, and implement policy at the village, subdistrict, and district levels, as well as practical enhancements for improving safety and care practices in the home with goals of overall “quality of life among older persons,” “health within illness,” and “active aging.”
Japanese academics, on the other hand, were greatly impressed by the comprehensiveness of the care provided to the elderly by family and community members. They gained practical insights into how to build capacity among family and community members in an array of homecare skills that are often provided through home visits from nurses in the Japanese context.
The publication of the Journal of Health Research article led Assoc. Prof. Dr. Decha to create a new project to enhance quality of life for the elderly through programming and research with the support of the Thai Health Promotion Foundation. Activities will focus on policies and management strategies that will build the capacity of community members in developing strong elderly health care systems, and will improve care directly through community health promotion activities. Assoc. Prof. Wilawan Senaratana, the former Dean of the FON, is a main collaborator in this proposal. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Decha looks forward to maintaining networks with universities in Japan to continue fostering knowledge exchange on evidence-based practice in elderly care.
As for future collaboration, Asst. Prof. Dr. Rangsiya Narin is travelling to Kobe this summer for research which she will be conducting over three months. In collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yuko Uesugi, Asst. Prof. Dr. Rangsiya is focused on falls prevention for older people in the Japanese context. “In Japan, there is a great range of facilities and equipment to prevent falls; grab bars and other such supports, which are widely used. There is little of this in Thailand currently.” She expects to be developing new tools to collect data in the Japanese context, especially around health literacy.
Asst. Prof. Dr. Rangsiya’s current work on falls prevention is informed by her innovative development of the Holistic health care among older persons in community, or “Sharing Happiness” program. This capacity-building program is rooted in Buddhist concepts to train older people to provide education to peers and others in holistic health behaviors, including offering direct service as appropriate. After implementing the program in two districts of Lamphun province, she identified the issue of falls prevention as one needing further attention to enhance related training and infrastructure. Asst. Prof. Dr. Rangsiya is also supervising a Kobe masters’ student, Wataru Ito, in his work on health literacy among older Japanese people in Chiang Mai.
Asst. Prof. Dr. Rangsiya appreciates how FON’s relationship to the Japanese community in Chiang Mai has been strengthened by the partnership with Kobe, and she highlights how knowledge sharing benefits both institutions in understanding their own contexts through comparative perspectives. She is delighted to contribute to the foundation of the partnership between the Faculty of Nursing at CMU and Kobe University, and looks forward to continued joint research initiatives that build on this strong relationship.