Purpose  The number of Vietnamese technical intern trainees is increasing annually due to the revision of the Immigration Control Law in Japan. However, there are few studies focusing on the trainees’ health issues and medical consultations. This study aims to clarify the difficulties they face in obtaining healthcare services after coming to Japan.Method  Semi-structured interviews regarding the difficulties faced by trainees in accessing medical services were conducted. Twelve Vietnamese technical intern trainees (eight men [66.6%] and four women [33.4%] with an average age of 26.3 years and average stay period of 2 years and 3 months) living in the Kansai area were interviewed. Data analysis was conducted using a qualitative descriptive method.Results and Discussion  Four categories of difficulties in receiving medical treatment were found: “no hospital visits unless the situation worsens,” “inability to receive medical services without the support of company or supervising organization officials,” “inability to seek confirmation even if they have questions or are dissatisfied,” and “hesitation for seeking medical help due to work and scheduling.”   For Vietnamese technical intern trainees, the company or supervising organization officials’ support played an important role in accessing medical services. Moreover, even if the trainees had doubts or dissatisfactions, they were unable to ask questions and receive confirmation. Therefore, it is necessary not only to actively explain the need for medical services to the company or supervising organization officials but also to ask the trainees if they have any doubts.Conclusion  The company and supervising organization official’s support played an important role at accessing medical service. It will be essential to cooperate not only with them but also with the occupational health field and regional medical institutions.

Objective  In Japan, the low pass rate of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) foreign nurse candidates in the National Nursing Examination is a serious issue because it suggests differences in nursing practice between the countries. This study aimed to reveal the discrepancy in nursing practice between Indonesian and Japanese nurses.Methods   Questionnaires were sent to 9 hospitals to collect data from Indonesian and Japanese nurses working together. It included the “Self-evaluation Scale on Oriented Problem Solving Behavior in Nursing Practice” to measure the quality of problem-solving behaviors.Results  Participants were 17 Indonesian (8 males, 9 females; average age: 30.6 years) and 50 Japanese nurses. Of them, 9 Indonesian nurses had not passed the National Nursing Exam. No remarkable difference was observed between the Indonesian and Japanese nurses on any of the sub-scales of the problem-solving scale. However, after matching the groups with nursing experience years (by selecting Japanese nurses with an experience of less than 10 years, n＝22), a notable difference was observed in “Securing consent from the patient for providing nursing care,” with Indonesian nurses who had not yet passed the National Nursing Exam scoring significantly lower than Japanese nurses (p＝0.01 for the Wilcoxon test with Bonferroni correction). While Japanese nurses assist patients with activities of daily living, the patient’s family is mainly responsible for such care in Indonesia. Therefore, Indonesian nurses do not fully acknowledge their need to secure consent in providing daily life assistance to patients.Conclusion   Indonesian nurses who had not passed the National Nursing Exam scored significantly lower on “Securing consent from the patient for providing nursing care.” Therefore, it is recommended to provide them education to enable them to recognize the importance of practicing nursing based on nursing plans that consider patients’ needs.

Introduction  With the increase in the number of foreign residents in Japan and the aging of the population, it is expected that there will be more opportunities to provide home-visit rehabilitation to foreign residents are increasing. The purpose of this study was to clarify the difficulties that physical therapists (PTs) face when providing home-visit rehabilitation to elderly foreign residents.Methods  A qualitative descriptive study using semi-structured interviews was conducted with PTs who have experience in providing home-visit rehabilitation to elderly foreign residents.Results  The subjects were 11 PTs (9 males and 2 females), with an average age of 39.3 years and the average years of PT experience 13.7 years. The analysis revealed that the difficulties faced by PTs included 10 categories; [Differences in rehabilitation concepts with foreign elderly], [Difficulty in goal setting], [Lack of multilingual support and access to information on support], [Burden of dealing with non-rehabilitation work], [Building trust through daily communication], [Detailed communication in different languages], [Dealing with cultural differences], [Differences in religion and sensitivity to this topic], [Dealing with elderly foreign residents who are hesitant to contact with Japanese people] and [Anxiety about conducting home-visit rehabilitation due to PT’s preconceived notions about foreigners].Conclusions  Differences in the rehabilitation concepts between Japan and some foreign countries were found as a difficulty faced by PTs. Difficulties due to language differences were significant, and institutional difficulties also existed, such as lack of multilingual support and access to information on support. In addition, by visiting private homes and providing individualized services, PTs sometimes had to deal with problems faced by elderly foreign people other than rehabilitation work. These were considered to make it difficult to implement goal-oriented rehabilitation.