Suchergebnisse

Reactive to changes in health care and the economy, the delivery of social work services has been expanded to include the home visit as an alternative to meeting with clients in the agency or hospital. The home visit has been a vital tool in the articulation of social work services throughout the history of the profession. This article will briefly trace the history of the beginning of home visitation and will discuss some of the techniques, difficulties, and benefits of this time-honored professional task. In short, this article will "revisit" the home visit.

A simple technique which expands the worker's professional knowledge of a family has intrinsic value in current efforts to strengthen family life

Home visits are an extension of school education as well as an occasion for the practice of teacher morality. The practice of effective teacher morality during home visits requires teachers to pay attention to four aspects of morality: integrity, equality, catering to individual needs, and caring.

Incorporating home care education into the medical school curriculum is essential for providing a learning experience not duplicated elsewhere. Students rotating through family medicine write a reflection paper on their experiences. The papers about home visits from July 2000 to June 2004 were analyzed by a constant comparison technique developing seven themes: student paradigm shift in their understanding of causes vs. effects of disease, misconceptions about treatment, access to care, a return to the roots of medicine, quality of family caregiving, broader implications of providing care, and controversial issues. The students' papers demonstrate the unique environment of home visits.

Abstract Background Japan has the highest aging population in the world and promotion of home health services is an urgent policy issue. As home-visit nursing plays a major role in home health services, the Japanese government began promotion of this activity in 1994. However, the scale of home-visit nursing agencies has remained small (the average numbers of nursing staff and other staff were 4.2 and 1.7, respectively, in 2011) and financial performance (profitability) is a concern in such small agencies. Additionally, the factors related to profitability in home-visit nursing agencies in Japan have not been examined multilaterally and in detail. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to examine the determinants of financial performance of home-visit nursing agencies. Methods We performed a nationwide survey of 2,912 randomly selected home-visit nursing agencies in Japan. Multinomial logistic regression was used to clarify the determinants of profitability of the agency (profitable, stable or unprofitable) based on variables related to management of the agency (operating structure, management by a nurse manager, employment, patient utilization, quality control, regional cooperation, and financial condition). Results Among the selected home-visit nursing agencies, responses suitable for analysis were obtained from 1,340 (effective response rate, 46.0%). Multinomial logistic regression analysis showed that both profitability and unprofitability were related to multiple variables in management of the agency when compared to agencies with stable financial performance. These variables included the number of nursing staff/rehabilitation staff/patients, being owned by a hospital, the number of cooperative hospitals, home-death rate among terminal patients, controlling staff objectives by nurse managers, and income going to compensation. Conclusions The results suggest that many variables in management of a home-visit nursing agency, including the operating structure of the agency, regional cooperation, staff employment, patient utilization, and quality control of care, have an influence in both profitable and unprofitable agencies. These findings indicate the importance of consideration of management issues in achieving stable financial performance in home-visit nursing agencies in Japan. The findings may also be useful in other countries with growing aging populations.

AbstractThe decisions social workers make are often under the spotlight. Increasingly professional decision‐making is seen not as a stand‐alone single act but a continuum shaped by a range of factors making up a decision ecology. Social work has been described as an invisible trade, and one of its most private and invisible arenas is the home visit. Despite being a long established core activity in social work and an important site for social work judgement and decision‐making, the home visit has often been taken for granted, leaving it under‐researched and under‐theorized. We use a case study of a visit drawn from one of the authors' practice to examine the range of ecological variables that shaped the encounter. The intention is not to produce a generalized prescription for best practice but to provide a detailed exploration of a piece of practice and contribute to the development of practice‐based theory about social work decision‐making and home visiting.