Improving Accessibility of Home-visit Nursing Services

Japan is a super-aging society, and the medical needs of the elderly are increasing. The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare estimates that it will be necessary to build a system to support home medical care for about 1 million people by 2025. Therefore, it is essential to develop a system that allows medical treatment at home, not just at medical institutions and facilities for the elderly. In recent years, due to the shortening of hospital hospitalization, there has been a growing need for nursing services immediately after discharge in order to improve the quality of life at home. As a share of national medical care costs and long-term care benefit costs, however, growth of home-visit nursing services has been sluggish compared to other services. The main reasons are the complexity of coordinating information about home-visit nursing. To use home-visit nursing services, the instructions of a doctor must be followed, and when using long-term care insurance, one must also enter a care plan created by a care manager. These needs compel visiting nurses to make sales calls to doctors and care managers.

This program aims to develop a system that simplifies the procedures for using home-visit nursing services when patients with high nursing needs are discharged so that they can receive nursing services from hospital nurses and visiting nurses without interruption. It also seeks to propose policies to improve accessibility to home-visit nursing services by reviewing the forms and licensing mechanisms related to the provision of home-visit nursing services after discharge, deregulating handover through the use of ICT, and reviewing the calculation requirements for medical fees and long-term care fees.