Abstract
To facilitate the implementation of home-visit-based nutritional support (home nutrition support) for in-home recipients of national insurance-covered nursing care services, efforts should be focused on raising the awareness of in-home care services among registered dietitians(nutritional care providers) as well as providing more information on the importance and role of home nutrition support to nursing care managers(who design and organize a personalized care plan for each care recipient) and physicians. Despite the fact that health care professionals of various related sections recognize it as effective intervention, home nutrition support has not frequently been implemented in actual practice settings. To clarify the reasons for the poor implementation of support, we conducted an online survey among 700 randomly selected nursing care managers from 11:00 on April 24 to 19:00 on May 8, 2008, and collected data from a total of 623(89.0%) respondents. The results showed that 554 nursing care managers had previously incorporated nutritional interventions into their nursing care plans for recipients with:(1) dysphagia,(2) problems in preparing therapeutic diets,(3) decubitus ulcers or impaired nutritional status due to reduced dietary intake, and(4) tube feeding such as percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy(PEG) feeding, and that most of these required interventions were eligible for nursing insurance coverage when conducted as part of home nutrition support.
