A Survey of Towards the Utilization of Volunteers as a Preventive Measure for Cognitive Decline in the Elderly;

Abstract

Acute care hospitals in Japan are struggling to manage the elderly with cognitive decline. In this study, we performed text mining analysis of 312 nurses at 78 hospitals with over 200 beds in the top 10 prefectures in Japan with a large population aged 65 and over to assess scenes in which nurses wanted someone to be involved with the elderly with cognitive decline.The collection rate was 75.3%, and the valid response rate was 77.4%. Of the 294 sentences in the text data of the 164 participants, the total number of extracted words was 5,133 (2,183 words used), and the number of different words was 704. Among the top 100 frequently occurring words in the list of extracted words, the top 10 extracted words were "correspondence" (47 times); "time" (40 times); "need" (24 times); "fall" (17 times); "many" and "listen" (16 times); and "nurse call," "watch over," "person," and "talk" (all 15 times). From the data created by KH coder, it clarified that nurses in acute care hospitals recollected scenes, such as scenes in which they needed someone to provide basic care based on the symptoms of dementia, scenes in which they needed someone to be involved with patients with dementia for safe and comfortable recuperation, and scenes in which they wanted someone to execute work in the acute phase.