Gakken Medical Support

What it is

Gakken Medical Support (学研メディカルサポート, Gakken Medical Support Co., Ltd.) is a Japanese company that provides e-learning for nurses and other hospital staff, sold to hospitals and care facilities rather than to individuals. Its main product is Gakken Nursing Support (学研ナーシングサポート), a subscription library of video lectures that a hospital's nursing department uses for new-nurse training, clinical ladder training and hospital-wide mandatory sessions. The site's motto is "学びを広め 世界の健康を支える" (spread learning, support the world's health), and the company notes that it marks its 15th anniversary in 2026. The product page says Gakken Nursing Support has been No.1 in cumulative hospital installations for two years running (累計導入院数 2年連続No.1). The site is written in Japanese, with a Chinese version linked in the footer, and the content is built around Japanese nursing practice and regulation.

What a hospital gets

The product page sums up Gakken Nursing Support in four points: a wide range of courses for each audience, a system anyone can use, less work for the training staff, and an affordable price.

The course library

The basic package can be built into training by level, by clinical ladder stage or by years of experience, and also used for hospital committees. Each course has a clearly defined audience. The courses listed on the product page include:

• Basic skills (基礎習得コース), the essentials a new nurse needs to give care with confidence
• Mid-career (中堅コース) or psychiatric nursing (精神科コース); the page notes a facility chooses one of the two
• Nursing co-development (看護共育コース), for building a team that grows together
• Nursing management, nursing research, and courses for nursing assistants that use video and manga
• Severity and nursing-need assessment (重症度、医療・看護必要度), for ward management
• Dementia and older patients, and interprofessional collaboration
• Form 9 training (様式9研修コース), on the staffing and night-shift figures hospitals must report for facility standards, supervised by the Japan Facility Standards Administrators Association (一般社団法人 日本施設基準管理士協会) and launched on July 1
• Mimigaku (ミミガク), audio-only content on current topics
• Hospital management, admission and discharge support, and community care, the last new for fiscal 2026
• Global seminars with lectures by well-known speakers from abroad, and a "Nursing professional" series
• Nursing English, nursing and care around the world (new for 2026), and a check-video library
• Hospital-wide training for all staff: medical safety, infection control, ethics, emergency response, general workplace skills and, new for 2026, medical fee rules

The page says the themes are renewed every fiscal year, so a hospital can build a fresh curriculum each year. One customer hospital mentions that each lecture runs 15 minutes. The free demo on the page shows the style with sample lectures from university and hospital faculty, such as a mid-career lecture on auscultating breath sounds and a nursing assistant lecture on bed making and linen changes.

Using it

Staff can watch on a PC, smartphone or tablet, at any time and place. Viewing IDs can also be issued to staff on parental leave, and some hospitals use this to support return to work. A career sheet feature, based on the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's career design sheet for nurses, lets each nurse set goals and record experience; viewing history fills in automatically, and other training can be added for appraisal interviews.

Tools for the training team

Training staff can download and print lecture slides, test questions for review, worksheets for group work, and a certificate of completion (修了証). To help plan training along the clinical ladder, the company supplies a ladder correspondence table, a reverse-lookup version, a management ladder table and an annual plan template. A task set function lets the training team assign themes by years of experience or ladder stage. Contract managers use a facility page to check and change their services and see facility reports.

Price

The product page publishes the price of the basic package (general or psychiatric) by number of beds, excluding tax:

| Beds | Monthly price | |---|---| | 199 or fewer | 39,800 yen | | 200 to 399 | 49,800 yen | | 400 to 599 | 59,800 yen | | 600 or more | 69,800 yen |

Options cost extra, with details in the brochure: a foreign-language version of the nursing assistant course with subtitles in 5 languages and furigana-annotated materials, Nursing Manager Special Courses I and II, an extended admission and discharge support course, a premium management function for completion tracking and turning a hospital's own training into e-learning, and Gakken Movie Share, a service for filming and sending in-house training videos at 10,000 yen a month (月額1万円). The company also offers support before and after installation, from registering IDs to advice on using the e-learning across the nursing department and the hospital.

Other services

The e-learning business also includes Visual Nursing Method (ビジュアルナーシングメソッド), with current nursing procedures and technique videos, e-learning for the specified-act training of nurses, Gakken Care Support for care staff, Gakken Home-Visit Nursing Support and nursing practice simulation. A DX support business, with Gakken Medical Clip and Gakken Medical Web Partner, makes patient explanation videos (a service the site says launched in August 2024) and builds websites for medical and dental clinics, and a training production business runs training for academic societies, professional bodies and companies, including materials, training videos, web and registration pages and 3DCG video. Through the Gakken group's Kimini English service, a nursing English conversation course is offered with free lesson tickets.

What customers say

Four hospitals describe their use on the product page. Yachiyo Rehabilitation Hospital introduced Gakken Nursing Support and Visual Nursing Method in 2019 for new-nurse training, used e-learning in place of group sessions during the coronavirus outbreak, sets monthly required items, and bases its nursing procedures on Gakken's. Kariya Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Aichi Prefecture, has used it since April 2020 and pairs each theme with group work planned against the ladder table. Sado General Hospital has added options to the basic package since fiscal 2022 and uses it because staff cannot easily travel to distant training. Seikeikai Hospital, a user since fiscal 2018, prints session codes in its annual training list so staff can study anywhere.

Who it suits

Gakken Nursing Support suits Japanese hospitals, and psychiatric hospitals through the dedicated track, that want a ready-made nursing curriculum tied to the clinical ladder, with yearly updated themes and printable materials. The bed-based price makes cost easy to forecast. It does not fit organizations outside Japan or English-speaking teams, since the content is in Japanese apart from the nursing English course and the subtitled nursing assistant option.