ABSTRACT
This paper presents a nationwide survey about how Japanese home-visit nursing stations prepared and coped with the coronavirus disease 2019 COVID-19 pandemic. This study also aimed to provide a practical foundation and guide to develop business continuity plans (BCPs) for home-visit nursing stations and nursing care facilities to cope with pandemics. We applied a resource-focused BCP framework to efficiently collect and summarize knowledge and experiences from many facilities about the responses and countermeasures based on the three fundamental purposes to keep resources: prevent loss, promote increase, and utilize limited resources. We conducted a survey during Japan's third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and analyzed the responses using a qualitative and inductive content analysis method. We could develop categories to summarize various responses and countermeasures in a consistent and comprehensive manner. Based on the analysis results, we proposed six fundamental sub-plans to reorganize resource-focused BCP. The categorization and sub-plans are not special or innovative;however, since they focus only on resources and explain what we need to consider in BCPs in terms of action plans for resources, we expect that it is easier for BCP non-experts to understand the concept and utilize it for developing practical responses and countermeasures. © Fuji Technology Press Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Not only in developed countries, but as the population ages globally, staff resources are becoming increasingly scarce at medical and nursing care sites. Under such circumstances, COVID-19, which occurred in 2020, faced the crisis of collapsing medical practice on a global scale. What has made the world feel through the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic is the importance about the prevention of infection for medical and care staff. From this view point, it is considered to be extremely effective to recognize the condition of patients and care recipients without contact as much as possible. In this research, we will collect living behavior and vital data such as respiration and heartbeat in a facility without contact by combining sensing technology using 24GHz radar and multiple Wireless Sensor Network systems. We propose a hybrid wireless sensor network platform for medical and nursing care sites that can grasp the conditions related to patients and care recipients in each zone from the inside of the facility to the surrounding area and the suburbs. In the facility, a high-speed Wi-Fi mesh network will be used to build a network that can share the 24GHz radar signal data of each room in real time. One of our challenge is the detection of the behavior, respiration and heartbeat of the occupants by analyzing these radar signals without using a camera which is difficult to install in the field due to privacy protection issues, and without the subject wearing a wearable sensor directly. If it is detected that the patient or resident has gone out, the situation of the resident's walking area around the facility can be detected by using the Wi-SUN FAN mesh network in the area around the facility with a radius of about 500 m. In addition, in the suburbs area, GPS information using a LoRaWAN small terminal will enable centralized management of location information of residents without smartphones. As described above, in this study, we propose the Hybrid Wireless Sensor Network platform for medical and nursing care sites by utilizing 24 GHz radar sensing technology and hybrid wireless sensor network technology. We will report the results of a demonstration experiment of this system in an actual nursing facility.