OECD Reviews of Public Health: Japan
A Healthier Tomorrow
This review assesses Japan's public health system, highlights areas of strength and weakness, and makes a number of recommendations for improvement. The review examines Japan's public health system architecture, and how well policies are responding to population health challenges, including Japan's ambition of maintaining good population health, as well as promoting longer healthy life expectancy for the large and growing elderly population. In particular, the review assesses Japan's broad primary prevention strategy, and extensive health check-ups programme, which is the cornerstone of Japan's secondary prevention strategy. The review also examines Japan's exposure to public health emergencies, and capacity to respond to emergencies as and when they occur.
Japan's preparedness for public health emergencies
As an extremely disaster-prone country and a global economic hub, Japan must prepare for public health emergencies of all kinds, from natural hazards to pandemic and disease outbreaks, industrial accidents as well as security threats such as terrorism. This chapter looks at how Japan sets-up and implements public health emergency policies and at how it builds the resilience of its health system, in accordance with the OECD Recommendation on the Governance of Critical Risks and other international guidelines. This chapter suggests that there is scope to strengthen oversight of preparedness measures implemented at the local level, strengthen co-operation between Ministries, and increase the number of disaster preparedness exercises and drills.
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