A LONGITUDINAL EDUCATIONAL APPROACH TO IMPROVING END-OF-LIFE CARE IN JAPANESE NURSING HOMES

This study aimed to clarify the effect of a longitudinal educational approach for end-of-life care in nursing homes in Japan. Recently, nursing homes in the Japanese Long-term Insurance system have been required to perform new roles, including providing end-of-life care for residents. The situation brought anxieties to their staffs. Therefore, we conducted an educational approach for six nursing homes in Tokyo, Japan between June 2013 and March 2016. We established two kinds of participants. One group was 10 core members who participated in workshops about end-of-life care. The other group was general staff, who were affected by the core members on the job. The Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ) was used to measured job strain. The questionnaire determined the subjects, ages, gender, types of job, the experiences of end-of-life care, and scores for job strain. In order to promote more and better responses to our questionnaire, we decided not to assign linking identity numbers to the general staff. It obtained 215 (47.5%) responses from the general staffs at the initial research and the second time 245 (54.2%). There were no dropouts among the core members. Approval for this study was obtained through the Tokyo University of Technology Research Board in 2013. Before implementation of this educational approach, participants’ average age was 40.28 years, 55.8% were female, average job tenure at current nursing home was 109months. The score of work environment was significantly improvement whereas the emotional demands, quantitative and qualitative job overload did not change.