Quality Assurance in Long-Term Care and Development of Quality Indicators in Japan

Dealing with an aging society is a global challenge, and more countries than ever before are now mobilizing their healthcare systems to provide high-quality long-term care (LTC) to older adults. This paper reviews the current situation pertaining to aging and the issues for measuring the LTC quality in Japan. It also introduces current efforts to develop quality indicators for measuring LTC quality. Assuring the quality of LTC and developing indicators to measure its quality is a challenge worldwide. Detailed systems for LTC quality measurement have been developed and managed, primarily in the US. In Japan, on the other hand, such systems do not exist; the public LTC system mostly depends on the evaluation of structural aspects, such as facility structure and staffing. Our research group has been developing quality indicators to measure LTC quality. In the future, we aim to evaluate care quality in various LTC settings using the proposed quality indicators, aiming to improve care quality across LTC settings in the community-based integrated care system.