Abstract
Purpose: To identify, through a review of the literature, the current status and challenges facing childcare support provided by public health nurses. Method: We searched the relevant literature featured in Japanese Central Review of Medicine and Public Health Nursing Journal. Results: According to Public Health Nursing Journal, public health nurses are providing diverse types of childcare support to numerous targets. However, few of their activities are reported in the form of research papers, which also tend to lack detail on the actual content of childcare support and on how mothers and public health nurses themselves assess such activities. The authors cite the main task of childcare support provided by healthcare professionals as supporting the programs to promote continued assistance in regional areas. Although childcare support by husbands is reported to help mothers' quality of life, and increase their self-confidence and awareness as childrearers, no papers describe efforts by public health nurses to contact the husbands or attempts to coordinate husbands' childcare support with that provided by public health nurses. Discussion: The literature confirms the need for public health nurses to provide childcare support. However, since they carry out frequent childcare assistance on a daily basis in a variety of forms, they appear to perceive it only as a vague concept. We conclude the following to be our future tasks: (1) to use the findings of case studies on childcare support as a starting point for research on establishing assessment indicators that can be used by the mothers, and thence to construct an assistance setup; (2) to study and evaluate a screening system; (3) to establish a method of providing mothers with ex post facto assistance; and (4) to study factors for assessing the degree of childcare support by husbands and to develop a method of following up the resultant findings.
