It’s typically the time of life for going on to schools of higher education, landing jobs, getting married, giving birth and raising children, to name but a few landmarks.

Members of the adolescent and young adult (AYA) generation, aged from the mid-teens through the 30s, face those life events as they pass through their impressionable years.

People of that generation are also prone to suffer from an intense sense of anxiety and isolation once they have fallen into a need for protracted treatment for diseases and other causes. But we don’t always precisely know what kind of support should be provided.

Hospitals have worked hard to find an answer to that question in cancer treatment and other fields. Experts and patients have formed a study group for extensive discussions on the matter.

Their efforts could provide a clue to the entire society for thinking about necessary support measures and for putting them into practice.

Two years ago, the Osaka City General Hospital set up a ward of 27 beds exclusively designated for members of the AYA generation. The ward has mostly accommodated cancer patients.

A space has been created in the ward to allow patients to interact with their family members. The ward’s staffers sometimes work beyond the medical field to relieve the patients’ fretfulness about being left behind by others.

The ward officials have realized remote classrooms by using a telecommunications line to link the hospital with a school. They have also enlisted the help of the hospital’s workers in various occupations to organize practice job fairs.

The Shizuoka Cancer Center in Nagaizumi, Shizuoka Prefecture, was the first in Japan to set up, in 2015, a ward dedicated to members of the AYA generation. It operates counseling services for listening to a broad array of consultation requests, which range all the way from schoolwork to financial problems.

“If there are social barriers, we look for solutions so we can overcome them together,” said Yoshiko Mimaki, a medical social worker with the institution.

The center has worked with outside institutions, including a public employment security office, with which it has organized counseling sessions on demand.

The AYA Oncology Alliance, a general incorporated association based in Nagoya, organizes volunteer members, such as medical workers, scholars, those who have had cancer and their family members.

“There is a limit to what medical workers can do by their own efforts alone,” said Chikako Shimizu, the alliance’s vice chief director, who is a doctor with the National Center for Global Health and Medicine.

The alliance promotes cooperation between medical institutions and other regional organizations, using 14 medical institutions across Japan as models.

But these pioneering efforts have yet to produce the echo they deserve.

In the field of school education, the Hiroshima Prefectural Board of Education said last autumn that high school students who are hospitalized will be considered having attended a class if they have taken it remotely from their school, even when no teacher is by their side in the hospital.

The education ministry, which previously said, in principle, a teacher should be present at the hospital, also changed its stance and said the presence of a teacher is no longer required.

“Patients become more eager to receive treatment when they have a goal to pursue,” said a doctor with Hiroshima University Hospital, where a high school student has taken a class in a sickroom.

Similar examples, however, remain thin on the ground. Opportunities remain particularly rare for high school students, in contrast to elementary school pupils and junior high school students, for whom a certain number of hospital classrooms are available.

The central and local governments should work together to rush to create a system that is similar to the one being operated in Hiroshima Prefecture.

There is also a mountain of unresolved problems connected to employment.

Moves are spreading, albeit slowly, for supporting workplace colleagues under treatment, but opportunities remain limited for would-be new employees.

The need for support is always there, whatever the age of the patient or the disease.

We should take the case of young people with cancer as a model for creating a society that allows all its members to take positive steps toward their dreams and desires.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Feb. 5