Dr. Kawthar Mahmoud, head of the Nursing Syndicate, announced in a statement on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, the syndicate’s rejection of statements by Mohamed Abdel Latif, Minister of Education and Technical Education, on establishing international applied technology schools for nursing in cooperation with the Japanese side, and said the syndicate will not accept any decisions or moves affecting the nursing profession or its future without consulting the competent bodies.
Abdel Latif had met on Sunday, October 18, 2026, Hidetaka Matsuo, CEO of the Japanese educational group Kyoto Ekoikan, and a delegation from Kyoto University of Nursing and Health Sciences, to discuss converting 20 technical schools into international applied technology schools, including 10 nursing schools, 5 information technology schools and 5 elderly care schools. The minister described the cooperation as the first of its kind between the two countries in technical education and expressed hope that classes at these schools would begin during the coming academic year.
The syndicate head criticized applying the Japanese model in Egypt after the preparatory stage, saying that Japan itself has no system for admission to nursing schools after this stage, and called for studying the actual nursing education system there and benefiting from it. She added that the syndicate’s vision is based on nursing education after obtaining the General Secondary Certificate, whether in technical education or higher education, to prepare cadres with scientific and professional maturity.
The syndicate head said that elderly care requires advanced training and specialized knowledge, and that it has postgraduate programs, including diplomas and master’s degrees, and stressed that developing nursing education must preserve patients’ lives and the quality of health care, according to Al-Ahram.
Photo: Faris knight via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
