Asian Pacific Journal of Disease Management Vol. 8(2017) No. 3-4

Despite enhancing deinstitutionalization since 2004, Japanese people do not have an adequate understanding of mental illness. As a result, they had more negative attitudes toward mentally ill persons than people of other nations. In addition, mental health care services have remained insufficient in Japan, and their readmission rate is still high. Relapse causes problematic behaviors in mentally ill persons. Neighbors often complain to public health nurses about it. However, no previous study has focused on managing neighbors’ complaints toward mentally ill persons, and improving the identification of the early warning signs of relapse of them is urgently required. The purpose of this study was to explore how public health nurses managed neighbors’ complaints toward mentally ill persons with problematic behaviors. In this multiple-case study, 11 Japanese public health nurses were interviewed in 2013. Based on the neighbors’ complaints, the public health nurses understood the association between the problematic behaviors of the mentally ill persons and their probability of relapse, and assessed their ability to live independently in the community. The public health nurses were able to change the role of the neighbors from a complainer to a key communicator for the mentally ill persons. To prevent hospitalization of the mentally ill persons, public health nurses managed neighbors’ complaints as useful clues to identify their probability of relapse, as well as to reduce neighbors’ stigma toward them. The findings will help to reduce neighbors’ misunderstanding of their mental illness, the readmission rate and medical costs of them.

Clinical supervision is effective for preventing the burnout of community mental health professionals. However, the tacit knowledge of the clinical supervisors who assessed the issues associated with community mental health care has not yet been elucidated. The purpose of this study was to clarify the assessment strategies used by clinical supervisors who are focused on community mental health care. This was a cross-sectional study, in which content analysis was performed on the supervisors’ advices regarding the assessment of each community mental healthcare professional. Among the 309 cases, we identified 2 main types of assessment strategies used by clinical supervisors, namely, ‘clarification of the present and future health issues of the person with mental illness and his/her family’ and ‘consideration of a support plan for the person with mental illness and his/her family’. The clinical supervisors assessed the health issues and future problems of the person with mental illness and their family, and also identified inappropriate care provided by the community mental health professionals. Our findings contribute towards improving the quality of care for people with mental illness and their families. Our results indicated that clinical supervisors try to communicate effectively with professionals from multiple disciplines, to enhance collaboration between professionals, and to prevent the burnout of mental health professionals.

Even though smoking is closely related to drinking and other negative health behaviors, there are few papers on the relationship between smoking and checkup attendance. We investigated whether smoking histories related to differences in annual checkup attendance.

We obtained undergraduate students’ smoking histories at annual medical checkups at a mid-sized private university in Japan. We examined a dataset containing the data for all 17,831 male and 2,740 female undergraduates from a typical Japanese university’s regular spring medical checkups for every year from 2008 to 2013; it included whether an undergraduate had attended the checkup and had ever smoked. We investigated the number of times undergraduates attended the checkup by gender, survey year, student’s year of study, and smoking history.

Compared to undergraduates who had never smoked, those who currently or historically smoked attended significantly fewer annual checkups. The difference was more remarkable among men.

The results suggested that more could be done to encourage undergraduates who smoke to have checkups, which could provide an opportunity for smoking cessation advice and treatment.