Care Service Staff's Awareness of the Management of Undernutrition in Japan

Abstract

This study aimed to help develop collaborative care models for care service staff working in homes and residential facilities to implement measures for the improvement of undernutrition in terms of nursing care. The survey is care service staff’s awareness of undernutrition including required information. Although nursing care providers were aware of the overall care-related needs of their care recipients, they were in somewhat knowledgeable level about the nutritional health/functioning status that can be assessed by the nutritional condition indices such as the BMI(body mass index) and serum albumin level. The results of this study suggest that the level of nursing care service providers' awareness of the improvement of undernutrition of the elderly in need of nursing care was not high; although in-home nursing care providers understood the overall picture of services or their tasks including the levels of nursing care required by elderly patients and their levels of independence in ADL(activities of daily living) according to their degrees of disabilities or dementia, they did not comprehend the nutritional status of their patients such as the styles of diet and intake of meals; and nursing care service providers in residential facilities were aware of the nutritional status of their patients, although they were not unable to understand the overall picture of services. There were significant differences in the levels of the awareness of the improvement of undernutrition by the types of nursing care-related professions ; for example, while consultants were only aware of the basics of services like the level of nursing care required by patients, nursing care providers understood the styles of diet as well as dental and choke-related conditions and health care professionals comprehended the intake of meals, BMI, and serum albumin level. The study results suggest that it is necessary to develop tools for the collection of care service-related information and assessment to be shared by care service staff to improve undernutrition to prevent the elderly from becoming to require higher levels of nursing care.