Withdrawing the medium-term plan and rebuilding visiting-nurse operations (2025)

What growth by the numbers left behind

This judgment is not contained by the phrase "cleaning up after a fraud that exploited a gap in the system." The medium-term plan that was withdrawn had been built on the premise of stacking up visiting-nurse income from medical insurance to the maximum and increasing facilities to 140. Set against the fact that the corporate strategy department imposed on the field a "pass mark" of ¥810,000 per resident per month, and that more than nine in ten residents uniformly received multi-staff visits three times every day, the withdrawal of the plan can be seen as the correction of a wrongdoing and, at the same time, as the work of redrawing the blueprint for growth itself. The difficulty of this case lies in the structure whereby the revenue source that supported growth by the numbers was also the breeding ground of the wrongdoing.

That said, the weight of the rebuilding shows in the figures that followed. Making visits appropriate lowers the unit revenue per bed; a loss remained in the following year as well as in the year to March 2025, and President Nawashiro put ¥1bn of his own into the company to patch the finances. Whether a structure that has thinned out its officers and deepened the character of sole management can rebuild on care-insurance-centred revenue while keeping the distinctive strength of Parkinson’s specialization is still not visible. In a business where part of the revenue that swelled during rapid growth was supported by deviation from the system, rebuilding the organization cannot be separated from rebuilding the business model — Sunwels’ withdrawal of its medium-term plan can be read as one instance of that.