Health

Health is one of the theme of great importance and attracts the highest levels of interest. The Fujifilm Group began manufacturing X-ray film in 1936, soon after the company was established. Today, the scope of our businesses has expanded into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases in our drive to become a “total health company.” By mobilizing our technologies, products and services, we are working on issues that include responding to unmet medical needs, resolving the medical divide, reducing the burden on medical professionals and alleviating high medical expenses through the prevention/early detection of disease.

Moreover, we are implementing measures to protect the health of our employees, which is essential to our Group’s sustainable development.

The Fujifilm Group is striving forward in the development and dissemination of new therapies for unmet medical needs, where effective treatment is still to be found. Fujifilm possesses the highly functional material synthetic technologies and engineering skills that we have gained through our photographic film development and production, including advanced nano dispersion technology, analysis technology, and production engineering technologies. We are actively seeking synergetic collaborations with business partners who also possess superior technologies, in order to develop new solutions in regenerative medicine and cell therapy and improve accessibility to such advanced treatments.

The rapid aging of society is proceeding in Japan, and population and economic growth are advancing in emerging countries. As a result, these countries are experiencing expanding medical demands, giving rise to a variety of problems, such as the insufficient number of doctors and nurses, their harsh working conditions, and regional disparities in medical services. The death rate from infectious diseases is still high in developing countries, and eradication of infectious diseases, such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, is also one of the SDGs. The Fujifilm Group is contributing to the establishment of a sound medical environment and to supporting medical staff to realize disease prevention, make early diagnoses, and provide early treatment through combining our exclusive technologies acquired over the years with the large volume of data we have accumulated in the medical IT field, and with AI technology.

To maintain our health, it is important to detect diseases at an early stage even if there are no recognized symptoms, or take countermeasures for unpleasant symptoms before they have reached the level of disease. However, one in three Japanese people still do not take a regular health check* regardless of the seemingly wide understanding of the necessity for such proactive health checks. The Fujifilm Group contributes to the early detection and treatment of diseases through making easy-to-use self-health check systems widely available across society.
* The FY2014 National Health and Nutrition Survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare reported that among people of ages 20 and above in Japan, 27.8% of males and 37.1% of females had not undergone a health check (general health check, health examination or complete medical examination) within the last year.

As the aging society progresses, increasing healthy life expectancy* is a significant social issue in order to minimize increasing medical costs and elderly care issues. At the same time, the elderly are expected to remain an active part of society. The Fujifilm Group is contributing to realize "The older you get, the more enjoyable life is. A society with laughter regardless of age."
We do this by offering anti-aging care cosmetics and foods with functional claims which we have taken salacia and astaxanthin in and developed using our exclusive technologies.
* Healthy life expectancy: Formally, Healthy Average Life Expectancy (HALE). Average number of years that a person can expect to live in "full health" by taking into account years lived in less than full health due to illness and/or injury.

As the Fujifilm Group believes it essential to ensure that employees can work with energy and remain in good health both physically and mentally at their workplaces, to maintain our position as a leading company by Creating New Value which is stated in our Vision, we have been working to promote employees' health promotion activities focusing on the priority areas such as preventing lifestyle-related diseases and cancers, quitting smoking, mental illness and preventing overwork.
In occupational safety and health, our effort will be directed to ensuring safety at work for our employees by making safety a priority and to implementing absolute compliance with the laws related to safety and health, founded on the belief that "occupational safety is the basis of all business activities."