This paper reviews the history of Japanese home help service from the 1950s to 2000, not only for public homecare support services, which previous review have limited their focus to, but also private housekeeping services. The review finds that the Japanese home help history can be divided into three periods. In the first period, from the 1950s to the early 1960s, there was no clear national institution involved and mainly municipalities provided services for various clients. In the second period, from the middle of the 1960s to the early 1970s, the national system for the public homecare support services was established in 1962, which distinguished public and private suppliers as well as clients. In the third period, from the middle of the 1970s to 2000, as the social background shifted to more an aging population and nuclear families, private housekeeping service began to take care of elderly people living at home, a sector the public service had taken care of previously. As the distinctions between public and private sectors became unclear, reflecting the actual needs and social context, the national institution adjusted to follow the private sector. In conclusion, this review demonstrated the importance of including actions of the private sector in understanding the actual history of home help service.

This paper examines the nature and underlying factors of the features of the English ECEC system: the ‘mixed economy of finance and provision’ and ‘divided education and care’, focusing on the policy-making process under the New Labour government.

In the literature, these features have often been critically discussed as ‘continuity’ from the previous Conservative government. However, the key informant interviews, that were conducted with 13 key government officials in 2015, revealed that these two features were better understood as the particular modes of ‘incremental institutional change’ —the former as ‘drift’ and the latter as ‘layering’. Moreover, ‘environmental changes around policy and market’ and ‘tensions in policy agendas among the key government Ministers’ were identified as underlying factors that impeded the changes from becoming an institutional ‘displacement’, which is a more radical and fundamental change.

The objective of the present study was to elucidate the structure of advocacy services provided by medical social workers(MSWs). An anonymous self-report questionnaire survey was conducted by mail to a total of 3,991 MSWs who worked at hospitals and belonged to the Japanese Association of Social Workers in Health Services. Among the responses obtained, 1,191(30.0%)with no missing data were analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Based on the results, the following seven factors were identified:“conscientizing”, “negotiating”, “providing information”, “reforming hospital organizational structure”, “reforming related institutions”, “raising awareness”, and “representing clients”. In terms of correlations between factors, a positive correlation was observed between almost all factors, and in particular, strong positive correlations were seen between “negotiating” and “representing clients” and between “negotiating” and “raising awareness”. These findings suggest the need to perform comprehensive services that consider the mutual relationships among these seven factors.

This paper reviews research on people with substance-related disorders, and focuses especially on research about family support. The author used the databases “Ichushi”, “CiNii Articles” and “PubMed”. The search covered relevant studies published from until 2014. Forty-three related articles were identified through these databases. These articles were analyzed focusing on family relations and related problems.

The main findings were as follows: (i) The target persons for family support of people with substance-related disorders were mothers in Japan, while in countries other than Japan, the targets varied and included parents, spouses, partners, caregivers, and professionals. (ii) The related problems of substance-related disorders were parenting support (including neonatal abstinence syndrome), HIV, harm reduction, traumatic stress disorders of addicts, and co-occurring disorders. The review findings suggest that effective support focused on related problems of substance-related disorders should be begun for various family members, and this is the biggest future challenge in Japan.

The Employment Transition Support Program for People with Disabilities established in 2006 by the Japanese government has not yet achieved satisfactory results, and needs to be improved using a more effective model that meets client needs in obtaining preferable competitive jobs and continuing at them.

This study aimed at developing the proposed effective model and its critical components that we have been constructing using program theory and qualitative research on good practices of the program. We attempted to verify the validity of the critical components of the proposed model through a nationwide field trial for formative evaluation during a 1 year period at 22 sites to develop a more effective and feasible model, and then we discussed the potential to develop an institutional model using the proposed model. Our results indicated that enforcing critical components into effects contributes to the increased number of persons getting competitive employment and higher continuing employment rates as program outcomes. Furthermore, we found it was necessary to get support for on-the-job training and to investigate supports connected with other aid organizations related to persons staying at their jobs. The results suggested that inclusion of the critical components should be considered in the national institutional model, and methods to modify the national model were discussed.

Social workers have become accustomed to being supervised, but there remains an uneasiness regarding the legitimacy of this supervision. To reduce this uneasiness, it is necessary to create an ideal image of a supervision session and an index for supervisors to evaluate their own skills after the session. In this paper, the author shows the process of such a supervision session and the kind of supervisory skills used for every stage during the session.

Twelve supervisory sessions held by supervisors with more than 10 years of work experience were studied, and 634 skills seen during the sessions were divided into three categories:these were skills that the supervisees themselves presented, skills that promoted communication of supervisees, and skills that promoted reflection and recognition by supervisees. It was clear that the preferred approach was to promote the recognition by supervisees of problems in their own growth begins from the initial stages of supervision session. In addition, supervisor perseverance was strongly needed, and an approach was created that used a progressive increase in skills for supervisees who did not recognize a problem in their growth during the development stage.

This study used the approach of Glaser School of Grounded Theory(Glaser 1978, 1998)for generating a useful practice model of social work to support single-mother family living in communities, as a means conceptualize the social work practice. The results indicated that social workers “forming a support rhizome” for single-mother families. Several concepts were considered to account for the “isolated single-mother family.” They included factors such as “disharmony between mother and support systems” and requirements such as “construction of a flexible relationship for mother at the center of synchronization and difference”, “construction of a trade-off relationship between mother and children”, and “construction of a support system that incorporates these differences,” resulting in the “self-organization of a support system with single-mother family and relevant organizations,” which involved “forming a support rhizome” centered on a useful practice model of social work to support single-mother family living in communities.

This study investigated assistance requests made to Community General Support Centers. It targeted welfare commissioners and identified factors in elderly suspected dementia patients. Responses were sought from 2,751 welfare commissioners belonging to the Council of Welfare and Child Welfare Commissioners of Prefecture A, to determine favorable attributes of commissioners and their “knowledge of anti-dementia drugs”, “positive attitude toward patients with dementia”, “inclination toward assistance requests made to the Community General Support Centers”. For statistical analysis, first, a classification was conducted using a latent class analysis for the inclination regarding the requests for assistance made to the Community General Support Centers. Second, the relationship between the attributes and each latent class was studied using a multinomial logit model.

Consequently, four classes were extracted using the latent class analysis. Results of the multinomial logit model showed that “a positive attitude toward patients with dementia” was significantly related to all latent classes. Inclination characteristics related to assistance requests to the welfare commissioners in the Community General Support Centers were classified into four categories. Furthermore, the study revealed that to increase the inclination regarding assistance requests to the Community General Support Centers, it is important to have a positive attitude toward patients with dementia.

The parents of children who were removed by authorities without parental consent experienced disrespect and were totally dissatisfied with the process. This study is aimed at clarifying the process and its structure where collaborative working relationships were constructed between these parents and the child protection services.

The author collected data by conducting semi-structured interviews with 12 practitioners, mostly social workers. Grazer's Grounded Theory Approach was applied for an analysis from which 32 concepts and 14 categories were identified. The core concept was ‘linking’. Much more, ‘linking’ was found to have three stages: ‘creating a dialogue’, ‘letting the linking grow’, and ‘standing by the family.’ It became clear that the practitioners have approached the family via ‘linking’ in building working relationships.

As recognized in Japan, “the provision of special care environments”(amenity beds)is a form of mixed medical care(i.e., a combination treatment that includes procedures not covered by medical insurance)that involves two medical problems with different dimensions. These two aspects appear, at first, to be mutually contradictory and it is not easy for medical professionals to understand or grasp them in an integrated manner, let alone patients or the general public. One is the macro aspect that amenity beds do not constitute a major problem in terms of medical costs, while the other is the micro aspect that amenity beds are nevertheless an object of significant interest for people being admitted to hospitals. The key point for a unified understanding of these two aspects is clarifying the correlation between amenity beds income and expenditure. Were such a correlation to be found, it would be possible to explain how these two superficially contradictory aspects could be mutually compatible. Consequently, the author conducted a nationwide survey and identified the latest correlation which is reported here.

This article describes four key points for successfully maintaining long term support groups for caregivers of people with dementia by analyzing the training program for support group leaders at the Alzheimer's Association in New York City(now known as CaringKind, the Heart of Alzheimer's Caregiving). The study consists of a bibliographical survey and a field survey of the training program. The key points of the program are: 1) conducting a pre-group screening interview; 2) sharing the rules of the group with participants (contracts); 3) sharing existing alternatives like their 24-hour helpline; and 4) providing on-going support including supervision meetings. All those things are important for successfully managing support groups. In the future, it will be necessary to analyze the details of supervision meetings to clarify the support groups' problems and consider strategies for improvement.

Anti-oppressive practice(AOP)is currently one of the key concepts in the field of social work practice. This article covers how AOP is used in the current Canadian social work context. To fully understand the Canadian context, the author first reviewed Canadian perspectives on critical social work and AOP. Then, the author analyzed job postings in Canadian resource/recruiting websites for non-profit organizations to illustrate the meanings and usage of AOP in Canada. How child welfare organizations in Ontario, Canada introduced AOP in their policies was also examined. From these findings and several interviews that were conducted, it became clear that although AOP is not mainstream, it is used and the knowledge and skills of AOP are required in different fields of social work. The author argues the possibility of AOP to be used in social work as a means of questioning today's social structure and tackling discrimination and inequality in Japanese social work practice.