A Comparative Study of Nursing Necessity Tools used in Korea and Japan

Abstract

Since 2016, the Korean government has been implementing an integrated nursing and care service system in which nurses and nursing assistants are fully responsible for all hospitalized patients. An appropriate level of nursing staff is necessary for the successful operation of the system. The purpose of this study was to increase the reliability and validity of the National Health Insurance-Nursing Necessity (NHI-NN) tool by comparing it with an analogous tool used in Japan. This was a descriptive methodological study. The study surveyed the nursing needs and nursing time provided for 1,646 patients from 40 wards of 26 hospitals over a 24-hour period. The reliability and validity of tools were measured using Pearson’s correlation, Cohen’s weighted kappa, and regression analysis. The correlation between the two tools was .889, which was found to have a high statistical correlation. The degree of concordance by patient classification group was also high. Both tools were useful in predicting the nursing time provided to patients. No instrument can accurately and fully measure a patient's nursing needs. Therefore, the continuous improvement of tools is needed for the timely projection of nursing resource requirements for the delivery of high-quality patient care.