Do You Know the Home Care Practice Building? | Satoko Nagata, Assistant to the Dean of the Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care
When looking at the Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care buildings on the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) from the front, you will notice a two-story building connected by a covered walkway to the left of the three-story school building. This building has its own entrance on the outside and looks like an independent house. This is the building known as the Home Care Practice Building. Since there is a sign in front of the indoor walkway that reads "Home Nursing Care Practice Room," that is likely its formal name, but many faculty and staff members, including those in the home nursing care field, call it the Home Care Practice Building or the Home Care Exercise Building.
Upon entering the Home Care Practice Building, you will find two bathrooms that can be viewed through acrylic panels and two toilets with different fixtures, followed by an entrance similar to that of a typical home. At the end of the hallway is a Japanese-style room, and the main space features a spacious wooden floor with kitchen setups in two locations—front and back. With dining tables, nursing care beds, and portable toilets in place, the space is large enough for about 20 people to sit in chairs for lectures or scatter for exercises. It is designed to resemble a spacious living and dining area. In the back, there is also a raised tatami space where one can relax with a low table and cushions. Taking the stairs to the second floor leads to a room designed like a bedroom in a typical home. Additionally, the main space on the first floor is an open atrium that can be looked down upon from the second-floor hallway, allowing for the observation of the bathrooms and other areas from above.
"Home Nursing Care Theory" was first included in the nursing education curriculum in 1994. While many nursing education institutions have home nursing practice rooms modeled after typical living rooms or Japanese-style rooms, it is rare to find an educational institution with a facility on the scale of ours. This serves as evidence of how much emphasis was placed on community care when the faculty was established in 2001. It is said that in the past, the atrium space was used to video-record home care experiences to create educational materials for home nursing.
In the current home nursing-related subjects of the Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care, students use the Home Care Practice Building to perform exercises related to assisting the daily lives of patients. In the Japanese-style room, they learn how to wash the hair of a patient lying on a futon, and in the bathroom, they learn how to assist with bathing using welfare equipment. Moving a patient in a wheelchair from the bed to the toilet in the wooden-floored room and transferring them to a standard household toilet are exercises unique to the Home Care Practice Building. Furthermore, students bring oxygen concentrators into the building and experience moving to the bathroom, toilet, or second-floor room while wearing a nasal cannula and inhaling oxygen. By experiencing the difficulties patients face in daily life firsthand, they learn the key points of patient education. Additionally, in the fourth-year Home Nursing Practice, students actually visit patients' homes with visiting nurses; the Home Care Practice Building is utilized during the pre-visit orientation to reconfirm etiquette for home visits. Because it allows for the experience of nursing in diverse environments, the building is also used for exercises in other nursing fields. On the other hand, there is a limit of about 30 people at a time, so creative solutions such as dividing students into groups are necessary for an entire grade of about 110 students to use it simultaneously.
To make effective use of this educational resource, we provide opportunities for people outside the university to use the Home Care Practice Building. Recently, in the field of home nursing, we have been conducting health and caregiving seminars at "Monnoki no Ie," a "Community Engaged Learning Space" (Chiiki no Engawa) near the SFC campus. Recently, we invited local residents to the Home Care Practice Building for a fall prevention seminar titled "Wisdom Before You Fall: Predicting Danger in the Home." Participants took part in a quiz while looking at items such as bedside lamps, mobile phone charging cords, wet bathroom floors, and curled-up kitchen mats, and then gained knowledge about fall prevention as the answers were revealed. Everyone enjoyed participating (the photos show the event).