Ayumi Igarashi

• Professor (Associate) at The University of Tokyo

Aim This study examined the home care nurses' implementation of comprehensive assessment of their clients, their education and the association betwwen the two. Staff education in home care nursing agencies has the potential to improve nurses' comprehensive client assessment, contributing to the provision of high‐quality home care nursing services....

Aim Standardized quality indicators for long‐term care (QIs‐LTC) were previously developed to ensure high‐quality holistic nursing care for older adults. This research aimed to assess the feasibility and reliability of unfavorable health outcomes measured by the QIs‐LTC and proposed strategies for improvement. Methods Thirty‐nine pairs of home car...

Background Health care students are instrumental in shaping the future of dementia care. Cultivating a positive attitude and understanding toward people living with dementia is crucial for diminishing the stigma associated with the condition, providing effective and person-centered care, and enhancing the quality of life for people living with deme...

Retail workers contribute to the daily wellbeing of customers, including those living with disabilities or diseases. The relational job design theory suggests that one’s perceived social impact (PSI) of their job contributes to improvements in job satisfaction, turnover intention, and persistence. Confirming such an association could encourage orga...

Background and Objectives Raising dementia awareness is essential for building a dementia-friendly community. However, existing studies have underexplored the effects of virtual reality (VR) dementia educational programs for the general public on enhancing positive attitude toward dementia. This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of a VR deme...

Background This study developed a short version of a scale measuring attitudes toward people living with dementia, the Four‐Item Attitudes toward People Living with Dementia Scale (APDS4), that could be included in a large population survey. Methods We used three datasets from Japan: a web panel survey, a community‐based mail survey, and data from...

BACKGROUND Health care students are instrumental in shaping the future of dementia care. Cultivating a positive attitude and understanding toward people living with dementia is crucial for diminishing the stigma associated with the condition, providing effective and person-centered care, and enhancing the quality of life for people living with deme...

Background Poor awareness of dementia care by healthcare professionals affects the quality of care for people living with dementia in acute care settings. Objectives This study examined the effectiveness of a virtual reality‐based educational programme for dementia for nurses working in acute care hospitals in Japan. Methods A dementia education...

Objective This study aimed to investigate the feasibility and validity of measuring implicit attitudes towards dementia in adults and older adults and evaluate the impact of dementia‐friendly education using virtual reality (VR) on implicit attitudes. Methods This study was a secondary analysis of data from a randomised controlled trial. Community...

Enabling older people to remain in and return to their homes after hospitalization or institutionalization (i.e., admission to care institutions, such as nursing homes), if they wish so, is a key principle of aging-in-place worldwide. This prospective cohort study examined the characteristics of older people who returned to their homes after hospit...

Older adults receiving home care nursing have certain health conditions and face continuous risk of declining physical functions. Identifying those at risk of functional decline based on these factors is essential for developing appropriate strategies for maintaining their conditions. This prospective cohort study in home care nursing agencies acro...

Aim To clarify the association between constipation, diarrhea, and long‐term laxative use in Japanese nursing home residents. Methods Data from 306 residents with chronic constipation aged over 75 years for basic characteristics, medication use, activities of daily living, and concurrent illness were collected via two consecutive 6‐monthly surveys...

Background Community members can play important roles in helping older adults in their community. This study aimed to clarify the actual situation of community members' helping behaviours towards older adults and examine the related factors. Methods This cross‐sectional study was conducted using an online survey system with a sample of 1000 commun...

Aims To (i) assess the adherence of long‐term care (LTC) facilities to the COVID‐19 prevention and control recommendations, (ii) identify predictors of this adherence and (iii) examine the association between the adherence level and the impact of the pandemic on selected unfavourable conditions. Design Cross‐sectional survey. Methods Managers (n...

Background Preventing peritoneal dialysis (PD)-associated peritonitis remains a major concern in continuing safe treatment and improving patient quality of life. This study aimed to determine the self-care education and quality care initiatives performed for patients undergoing PD and explored their association with patient self-care knowledge and...

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This umbrella review followed the JBI methodology and synthesized systematic reviews of the effectiveness of long-term home visit nursing for older people (≥ 60 years) on improving mortality, hospitalization, institutionalization, patient satisfaction, and quality of life. Eight bibliographic databases were searched, and 10 reviews with 22 distinct...

Introduction: Care quality in Japan's long-term care (LTC) agencies, including home care, is the responsibility primarily of individual agencies, and the evaluation of service processes and outcomes is minimal. Objectives: To describe the development of quality indicators for LTC (QIs-LTC) in Japan. Methods: QIs-LTC were developed through lite...

Family caregivers’ sense of security benefits older adults who receive home care. Advance care planning (ACP) is reported to affect family caregivers’ experience positively, but it might differ depending on family caregivers’ kin relationships with the older adults. This study aimed to investigate whether ACP for older adults in home care settings...

Maintaining real-time communication quality in metaverse has always been a challenge, especially when the number of participants increase. We introduce a proprietary WebRTC SFU service to an open-source web-based VR platform, to realize a more stable and reliable platform suitable for educational communication of audio, video, and avatar transform....

Background: Convenience stores play an important role in supporting community-dwelling older adults' lives. We started community-based participatory research (CBPR) in Nerima City, Tokyo Metropolitan area in Japan to develop a collaborative relationship to support older adults in the community-based integrated care system. Objectives: This study...

Objective: Hospital-based specialist nurses (clinical nurse specialists and certified nurses) are increasingly conducting patient home visits along with homecare nurses due to the increasing necessity of home care for persons with multiple medical needs. However, not much is known about such visits. Thus, this study examines collaborative visits by...

Background and Objectives Dementia-friendly training should be incorporated in neighborhood stores for people living with dementia to maintain engagement in social activities. However, there is a lack of evidence of dementia-friendly training in these workplaces, and existing trainings have time constraints. We developed a mobile microlearning prog...

BACKGROUND High blood pressure (BP) and physical inactivity are the major risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. Mobile health is expected to support patients' self-management for improving cardiovascular health; the development of fully automated systems is necessary to minimize workloads of healthcare providers. OBJECTIVE The objective of our...

Background: High blood pressure (BP) and physical inactivity are the major risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. Mobile health is expected to support patients' self-management for improving cardiovascular health; the development of fully automated systems is necessary to minimize the workloads of health care providers. Objective: The objecti...

Introduction: Family-oriented interventions in long-term care (LTC) residential facilities are heterogenous in design, characteristics, and outcomes. Objectives: To synthesize characteristics (e.g., type, provider, and duration) and outcomes of family-oriented interventions in LTC residential facilities. Methods: We followed the JBI methodolog...

Aim: To examine the response of long-term care (LTC) residential facilities to the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, and the antecedents and outcomes of this response. Design: A protocol of a cross-sectional survey. Methods: Two online questionnaires will be used to collect data from LTC residential facilities' managers and staff worldwide. Collect...

Background and Objectives Dementia awareness initiatives aim to promote helping behaviors towards people living with dementia. We applied the bystander intervention process model in the context of the general public’s helping behaviors towards people living with dementia, and we sought to identify the mechanisms underlying the association between d...

Background The need for dementia training for retail workers has been recognized by dementia-friendly initiatives. However, evidence for dementia training in non-healthcare workplaces is lacking, and dissemination is challenging due to constraints on private companies' time and finances. The online training program ReDeSign (Relational Design for D...

Many scientific associations hold annual meetings to which they invite the submission of abstracts. Most nursing associations require all co-presenters of an abstract to be association members. This study aimed to quantify the impact of waiving this requirement on the number of submissions, the number of new members, and the association’s revenue....

Family caregivers’ (FCs’) sense of security benefits older adults who receive homecare. Advance care planning (ACP) is reported to have positive effects on FC’s experience, but it might differ depending on FCs’ kin relationships with the older adults. We examined whether ACP for older adults in homecare settings is associated with FCs’ sense of sec...

The lack of public awareness and understanding of dementia affects the experiences of people living with dementia and their families. Dementia education and training for the general public have been gradually disseminated. We conducted a systematic scoping review guided by PRISMA-ScR to map existing evidence and identify dementia education and trai...

The prevalence of people with dementia living in long-term care (LTC) is high and rising internationally, and the need to improve LTC for people with dementia is widely recognized. In some countries, LTC quality assurance programs use quantitative measures of LTC quality. To better understand how LTC quality assurance programs address dementia, pro...

Background Worldwide, rather few studies have examined the association between burnout and care quality using objectively measured quality indicators, with most of the studies have relied on perceived quality outcomes. This study aimed to examine the association between staff nurses’ burnout and selected objective quality metrics in long-term care...

Aim: This study aimed to improve the understanding of the utilization rates and the characteristics of users of pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) among people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Methods: We used medical and long-term care claims data from between April 2012 and March 2013 from Kashiwa city in Chiba prefecture, Japan. The stu...

Background In the Arab and Islamic world, data on palliative and end-of-life (PEOL) care education are minimal. Objectives The current study's primary aim was to identify what PEOL care education is delivered to undergraduate nurses in Egypt and the teaching strategies used to deliver this education. A secondary aim was to assess the feasibility o...

While quality of life (QOL) is an important endpoint of homecare for persons with dementia (PWD), PWDs often have difficulty in articulating their QOL by themselves. Instead proxy-rating is often used. However, evidence is still scarce regarding to what extent proxy-ratings reflect actual QOL of PWDs. We examined the association between self-report...

Having a sense of security for living at home is essential to continue living at home and it is important to develop a community care system that enables high sense of security. Because frail to dependent older adults often accompany various conditions that require medical attention, receiving homecare nursing might allow the family caregiver to fe...

Our study aimed to explore the prevalence and factors of physical restraints among frail to dependent older adults living at home. We conducted an online survey to ask about the physical/mental conditions, demographics, service utilization, and physical restraints of community-dwelling older adults. Either home care nurse or care managers who were...

Background Convenience stores (CVSs), small retail chains that sell a variety of daily necessities ranging from sandwiches to shaving creams in a neighborhood, support older adults with dementia by providing them a convenient shopping place and meeting their small daily needs. Since 2017, we have conducted community‐based participatory research in...

Dealing with an aging society is a global challenge, and more countries than ever before are now mobilizing their healthcare systems to provide high-quality long-term care (LTC) to older adults. This paper reviews the current situation pertaining to aging and the issues for measuring the LTC quality in Japan. It also introduces current efforts to d...

Background There are no data on the provision of palliative nursing care in Egyptian adult intensive care units (ICUs). The Palliative and End‐Of‐Life (PEOL) Care Index is reliable and content valid; however, its construct and criterion validities have not been examined. Aims and objectives First, to assess palliative care education, practice, and...

For older adults to continue living in a community, they need to have a certain sense of security, especially in terms of the availability of healthcare in the community. The aim of this cross‐sectional study was to explore important factors of the sense of security among older adults in their continued community living, with particular attention t...

Background To date, a comprehensive, psychometrically robust instrument to assess palliative and end-of-life (PEOL) care education, practice, and perceived competence among intensive care unit (ICU) nurses does not exist. Objective To examine content validity and reliability of a proposed instrument to assess the PEOL care education-practice- comp...

Aim The dementia supporter training program is conducted by community general support centers (CGSCs) to raise dementia awareness. Convenience stores are widespread throughout Japan, and they play an important role in the daily lives of older adults. We examined whether participation of convenience stores in the program promotes cooperation between...

Background The literature on the situation of palliative and end-of-life care in the Arab and Islamic world, including Egypt, is limited and does not present a clear picture of the cultural context. This report aims to portray the palliative and end-of-life care situation in Egypt, focusing on the nursing viewpoint. First, we describe health- and i...

Aim Despite the large and growing body of research on quality care evaluation and improvements in long‐term care facilities, issues regarding the quality of care provided prevail worldwide. Further and more diverse research related to this topic is urgently required. To that end, this study examines the association between the subjective care proce...

Objectives Dementia‐friendly communities promote community coherence and reduce the risk of ageism in the community. This study examined the effects of a Virtual Reality (VR) educational program on participants' attitudes towards dementia and their sense of community related to supporting community‐dwelling older adults. Methods We delivered an ed...

Aims and design Various healthcare services in Japan provide self‐management interventions for older people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). To examine the influence of healthcare service utilisation on self‐management activities, we conducted a cross‐sectional survey of older people with COPD who received care through outpatient...

Background: Studies examining organizational factors that may influence constipation management in long-term care (LTC) hospitals are lacking. This study aimed to clarify the practice of constipation management in LTC hospitals and to explore its factors, including ward manager's perception, organizational climate, and constipation assessment. Me...

Background Studies examining organizational factors that may influence constipation management in long-term care (LTC) hospitals are lacking. This study aimed to clarify the practice of constipation management in LTC hospitals and to explore its factors, including ward manager’s perception, organizational climate, and constipation assessment.Method...

Background: Studies examining organizational factors that may influence constipation management in long-term care (LTC) hospitals are lacking. This study aimed to clarify the practice of constipation management in LTC hospitals and to explore its factors, including ward manager’s perception, organizational climate, and constipation assessment. Meth...

While the inter-RAI, a comprehensive geriatric assessment tool, contains standardized system for assessing quality of care, there are limitations for its everyday use. Limitations include large number of items, lack of apparent process indicators, and limited symptoms and disease-related information. A new approach was introduced to develop geronto...

Convenience stores play an important role in supporting community-dwelling older adults’ lives. This study aimed to describe the development of and to evaluate an educational program to promote collaboration between communities and convenience stores in Japan. We developed the educational program based on interviews of convenience store staff to en...

Aims and objectives: To explore the differences in clinical practice activities and work-related burden between nurses with past work experience other than nursing (second career nurses: SCNs) and nurses without any past work experience (nonsecond career nurses: NSCNs). Background: The number of SCNs is increasing. Some studies note that SCNs mu...

Objective On ageing, and as physical functionality declines, shopping for food and commodities can become a challenge. In Japan, convenience stores (CVSs) play an important role in older people's daily lives. This study investigated the relationship between the geographical accessibility of CVSs, supermarkets and grocery stores and shopping indepen...

Despite the growing importance of long-term care for older adults, there has been limited attention to its quality assurance issues in Japan. To start planning the initiation of continuous quality improvement in long-term care hospitals, we explored how nurses and care workers themselves perceived current approaches to quality assurance and improve...

We are developing a program for continuous quality improvement in long-term care hospitals, using case conference approach, with licensed nurses, nursing aids, and other professionals. We set up a four-step including 1) filling in a worksheet to describe the process of care provision, 2) reporting the case using the worksheet, 3) dialoguing on the...

In the continuously aging society, private sectors are expected to play a role in older adult care. Implementing an agreement between municipalities and private sectors is one of the key mechanisms for encouraging private sectors to participate in supporting older adults. The study's aim was to evaluate whether the support agreement has promoted su...

Background: In a rapidly aging society that has promoted extensive reforms of the healthcare system, clarifying functional patterns in long-term care wards is important for developing regional healthcare policies. This study aimed to classify patterns of inpatient characteristics among Japanese long-term care wards and to examine hospital/ward cha...

Abstract Background Previous studies have demonstrated that life story work has positive effects when used on older adults. This study aimed to examine the effect of life story work on the general mental well-being, self-esteem, and life satisfaction of older adults by comparing two groups – one with and one without depressive symptoms. Methods A q...

Aims To examine burnout and work engagement among nurses in Japanese long‐term care hospitals and their relation to nurses’ and organisational work values, and nurse‐organisation congruence of such values. Background Nursing managers must help improve nurses’ well‐being; however, no research has considered strategies to improve staff outcomes in l...

Background: Keeping long-term care nurses employed is necessary to sustain the current and future demand for high-quality long-term care services. Understanding the factors relating to intention to stay among long-term care nurses is limited by the scarcity of studies in long-term care settings, lack of investigation of multiple factors, and the w...

In this scoping review, the evidence of the benefits of screening older people for the five most common types of cancer in Hong Kong, namely colorectal, lung, breast, liver, and prostate cancers, will be discussed. Although cancer treatments can be extensive and a good prognosis is less likely if cancer is diagnosed at a late stage, screening progr...

Many studies have examined caregiver burden, but limited research has been conducted on the changes in the health conditions of family caregivers over time. The changes in family caregivers’ physical health during long-term caregiving should be explored and suggestions for supporting home caregiving should be proposed. This study tested the changes...

Objectives To examine the prevalence of the willingness of patients with diabetes to use a self-management tool based on information and communication technology (ICT) such as personal computers, smartphones, and mobile phones; and to examine the patient characteristics associated with that willingness. Research design and methods We conducted a c...

Aim: The financial interests of care management agencies can affect how care managers assist clients' use of long-term care insurance services. The present study examined the relationship between clients' service expenditures, and whether the home help and day care service agencies belonged to the same organization as the care management agency....

Aims and objectives: To explore the association between workplace bullying and workplace environment factors among nurses in Japan. Background: Workplace bullying among nurses is increasing globally and occurs more frequently than among other professions. However, there is little information on the impact of workplace environment factors on nurs...

Aim: Increasing service use under the long-term care insurance (LTCI) system in Japan requires a comprehensive understanding of how the services are actually used. This study aimed to identify patterns of LTCI service use and to examine the characteristics of the patterns. Methods: We analyzed data from a population of 4,339 older adults living...

Context: The sense of security scale was developed to indicate care quality within the community. Bereaved families have perspective to evaluate the quality of the care system. Objectives: The aim was to examine associations between end-of-life care and sense of security regarding regional cancer care among bereaved families. Methods: A cross-...

Despite societal efforts to alleviate the challenges, caregiving seems to constitute a substantial burden and source of stress for many families of older adults in Japan. However, precise information on the physical health of caregivers, based on objective data, is not available. The purpose of this study was to improve the understanding of the phy...

To promote home death, it is necessary to clarify the institutional barriers to conducting end-of-life (EOL) care and consider strategies to deal with this process. This study aims to clarify institution-related factors associated with the provision of home-based EOL care cases, and to compare them among three different types of home-care agencies....

Good interprofessional work (IPW) is essential to provide quality home-based end-of-life (EOL) care. The purpose of this study was to explore the factors of "good collaboration," as evaluated separately by home care nurses (HNs), home helpers (HHs), and care managers (CMs). The relationship was examined between their evaluation of good collaboratio...

To explore the associations between place of death and quality of death and dying and caregiver burden in terminally ill patients with cancer and their families. Two bereavement surveys were conducted in October 2008 and October 2011. A total of 2,247 family caregivers of patients with cancer who were deceased responded to the mail surveys (respons...

Background To develop a quality community-based care management system, it is important to identify the actual use of long-term care insurance (LTCI) services and the most frequent combinations of services. It is also important to determine the factors associated with the use of such combinations. Methods This study was conducted in 10 care manage...

Objective: We investigated palliative care knowledge, difficulty and self-reported practice among a region-wide sample of nurses who cared for cancer patients in Japan. Methods: A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was distributed to 9 designated cancer centers, 17 community hospitals and 73 district nurse services across 4 regions in 2008. We...

There are increasing occasions for care managers (CMs) to manage end-of-life (EOL) situations for older persons at home, in Japan. However, many CMs report anxiety, difficulties and low confidence in managing such care, although confidence is considered a significant determinant of professional performance. This study examined the confidence of CMs...

This study aimed to clarify the general public's perceptions of opioids and palliative care units (PCUs) and explore factors related to such perceptions. A cross-sectional, anonymous questionnaire was administered to 8000 people. Although a majority agreed with positive perceptions of opioids and PCUs, some also agreed with negative perceptions, su...

The primary aim of this study was to estimate the number of cancer patients who wanted home death based on the bereaved family survey. A postal survey performed on 1,137 bereaved family members in 4 regions to clarify the degree what they believed that the patient actually died where s/he had wanted on the Good Death Inventory, and to explore the p...

In Japan, long-term-care hospitals and facilities face the problem of quality of care, and providing adequate pressure ulcer care is one of the most urgent quality issues. Purpose of the present study was to explore the prevalence and incidence of pressure ulcers in long-term-care hospitals in Japan, and to identify factors associated with them. An...

Increasing numbers of patients with advanced cancer are receiving anticancer and/or palliative treatment in outpatient settings, and palliative care for outpatients with advanced cancer is being recognized as one of the most important areas for comprehensive cancer treatment. The aim of this study was to evaluate pain intensity, quality of life, qu...

This study examined the experiences of staff members from seven Japanese hospitals who had been treated aggressively by older dementia clients. Altogether, 170 questionnaires were analyzed. In the past year, 75.3% and 63.5% of staff members had experienced physical and verbal aggression, respectively. Working numerous night shifts, working shifts o...

Having a sense of security about the availability of care is important for cancer patients and their families. To develop a scale for the general population to evaluate feelings of support and security regarding cancer care, and to identify factors associated with a sense of security. A cross-sectional anonymous questionnaire was administered to 80...

To describe what characterizes preventive home visits with collaborative relationships among non-disabled home-dwelling older people in Japan. Preventive home visits have the potential to result in improved health outcomes among older people. Collaboration, mutual understanding and trust between visitor and the visited person seem to work as a vehi...

The purpose of the study was to evaluate changes in medical and nursing care for patients just after admission to a palliative care unit (PCU) from general wards in one city. Subjects were 260 consecutive patients admitted to a PCU. Data on changes in medical and nursing care occurring just after admission were collected prospectively using a struc...