The COVID-19 pandemic forced Niigata University of Health and Welfare to switch from face-to-face seminars to online seminars for their interprofessional education (IPE) courses. This paper aims to evaluate the impact of this change in course format on learning effectiveness, and to discuss problems noted with the course evaluation. The Japanese version of the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning (RIPLS), a 19-item questionnaire assessing readiness for interprofessional education, was used to measure the above impact. Comparing the year of face-to-face seminars with the year of online seminars, we found no significant difference in the number of items that showed a significant change in student evaluations between pre- and post-seminar. However, items that showed no significant pre/post difference - whether face-to-face or online - tended to emphasize practical problem-solving skills within students’ own majors and a negative view of students’ own professional independence, positioning them in a co-medical supporting role for physicians. Factor analysis did not reveal any factors such as collaboration across specialties or focus on issues outside of students’ own specialties. Therefore, in the year of the online seminars, we added two new questions to evaluate the effect of cooperative learning on problem-solving beyond students’ own specialties and found a significant increase after the seminars. These findings suggest that the Japanese version of RIPLS may be insufficient for evaluating IPE, and that we need to continue asking the same questions and improve the scale, considering the merits of both face-to-face and online seminars.

In the 2020s, Japan is experiencing an unprecedented decline in birthrate and aging, and a rapid population decline is expected in the future. Under these circumstances, there could be fierce competition between large and small local governments to secure their population. Given that, there are concerns that if we are slow to notice the demographic issues in each prefecture, the start of taking measures to improve the fertility rate may be too late to maintain the population. In this study, we investigated the natural population dynamics of the 30 municipalities of Niigata Prefecture in recent years. Among these, there were a few municipalities with unique birth rates in 2022, mainly towns and villages with relatively small populations. Subsequently, we calculated the total fertility rate for each year from 2013 to 2022 in 30 municipalities and examined trends over ten years. As a result, we identified towns with persistently high or low total fertility rates, and Tagami Town continued to have a low total fertility rate. The reason for this may be the continued moving outs of women who are about to give birth from Tagami Town to neighboring Akiba Ward and Minami Ward of Niigata City, Kamo City, and Sanjo City. These results suggest that it may be useful to observe the total fertility rate over time, not only at the national or prefectural level but also at the municipal level, to implement timely population decline countermeasures.