Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

This study analyzes the cooperation-promoting activity stages for home medical care and long-term care in an integrated community care system. As these difficult-to-visualize qualitative changes and activity processes lead to regional changes, a soft systems methodology (SSM) approach was attempted. From January 2014 to March 2015 (fifteen months), a collaborative-base project (tweleve bases) was conducted in Prefecture Z in Japan, in which the activities were summarized from status report records and telephone consultations. Information about the cooperative processes at two different bases (Bases A and B) were then extracted and compared. Base A was able to share problem solving and directionality between different professionals and organizations, and Base B was not. A seven-stage SSM was used to analyze the development of the regional cooperative system. Using thought analysis, the SSM also allows for a visualization of the systematic efforts and experiences to identify the initial regional challenges, the implementation and evaluation efforts, and the subsequent regional challenges. Based on the SSM analysis, the activities that contributed to the regional development at the bases are visualized.