Abstract
In North America and Western Europe, the Nurse Coordinator (NC) plays an important role as key person in solving the variety of problems faced by hemophiliacs and their families. Actually, NCs are playing active roles at North Kyushu Hemophilia Center (NKHC). The main activities of the NCs at NKHC are providing a link between hemophiliacs and the whole team, educating patients in the basics of hemophilia and home infusion and giving advice and offering support for medical, emotional, social and other issues. On the other hand, our country is very slow in introducing NCs for total care of hemophiliacs. Therefore, surveys of nurses and doctors were conducted to clarify the reason for delayed introduction of NCs in Japan. A survey of hemophiliacs and their families was also conducted to clarify the role of the nurse in Japanese hemophilia care. These results indicate that introduction of NCs in Japan is far behind that in other developed countries because of a variety of problems on the nursing side such as qualifications, treatment, training system and frequent transfer of the nurse, although nurses, doctors and patients hope to introduce NCs for hemophilia care.
