Our university organized the Nurse Practitioner Development Project in 2005. In Japan, there is at present no national license for nurse practitioners. However, we believe that graduate schools of nursing in Japan must train and educate NPs who can work independently of medical doctors and play a role in the primary care of all people because of the current unresolved distribution imbalance of physicians in urban and rural areas.

Since its organization, the project group has held several international meetings with the faculty of the Seoul National University College of Nursing, the Korea University College of Nursing, the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, and the Lienhard School of Nursing, exchanging information on NP education in the United States and Korea. In cooperation with these advisors, the project group established an original education program for the development of advanced practice nurses with high levels of expertise, the first such program in Japan. In April, 2007, the Japanese government decided to subsidize the research mission of the NP Development Project, and designated it as a resource to be used for the promotion of globalization in Japanese university education.

In 2008, the project group established a course for the training of advanced practice nurses in the fields of pediatrics and geriatrics in the Master's degree program at our university. After graduation, these nurses are expected to practice autonomously as NPs to meet the demands of health promotion and health maintenance in rural communities, where health delivery services will not be well distributed in the future due to the rapid ageing of the Japanese population and an increasing lack of medical doctors.