A Methodological Quality Evaluation of Meta-Analyses on Nursing Home Research: Overview and Suggestions for Future Directions.

(1) Background: The nursing home (NH) research field lacks quality reporting about meta-analyses (MAs), and most gradings of MA evidence are biased on analyzing the effectiveness of independent variables in randomized control trials. (2) Objectives: This study aimed to perform a critical methodological review of MAs in the NH research field. (3) Methods: We searched the articles from four databases (PubMed, MEDLINE, CINAHL, and PsycINFO) until 15th January 2021. We reviewed a total of 41 published review articles in the NH research field. (4) Results: The studies primarily fell into the following categories: medicine (17/41), nursing (7/41), and psychiatry or psychology (6/41); 36.6% of the reviewed studies did not use any validated MA guidelines. The lowest correctly reported PRISMA 2000 guideline item was protocol and registration (14.6%), and more than 50% of articles did not report risk of bias. Moreover, 78.0% of studies did not describe missing reports of effect size formula. (5) Discussion: NH researchers must follow appropriate and updated guidelines for their MAs in order to provide validated reviews, as well as consider statistical issues such as the complexity of interventions, proper grouping, and scientific effect-size calculations to improve the quality of their study. Future quality review studies should investigate more diverse studies.

Meal-Monitoring Systems Using Weight and Temperature Sensors for Elder Residents in Long-Term Care Facilities.

This paper presents a few meal-monitoring systems for elder residents (especially patients) in LTCFs by using electronic weight and temperature sensors. These monitoring systems enable to convey the information of the amount of meal taken by the patients in real-time via wireless communication networks onto the mobile phones of their nurses in charge or families. Thereby, the nurses can easily spot the most patients who need immediate assistance, while the families can have relief in seeing the crucial information for the well-being of their parents at least three times a day. Meanwhile, the patients tend to suffer burns of their tongues because they can hardly recognize the temperature of hot meals served. This situation can be avoided by utilizing the meal temperature-monitoring system, which displays an alarm to the patients when the meal temperature is above the reference. These meal-monitoring systems can be easily implemented by utilizing low-cost sensor chips and Arduino NANO boards so that elder-care hospitals and nursing homes can afford to exploit them with no additional cost. Hence, we believe that the proposed monitoring systems would be a potential solution to provide a great help and relief for the professional nurses working in elder-care hospitals and nursing homes.

Perceptions Related to Nursing and Nursing Staff in Long-Term Care Settings during the COVID-19 Pandemic Era: Using Social Networking Service.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate what opinions and perceptions people have about nursing and the role of nursing staff in nursing homes (NHs) on Social Networking Service (SNS) by analyzing large-scale data through social big-data analysis. METHODS: This study investigated changes in perception related to nursing and nursing staff in NHs during the COVID-19 pandemic era using target channels (blogs, cafes, Instagram, communities, Twitter, etc.). Data were collected on the channel from 12 September 2019 to 11 September 2020, 6 months before and after 12 March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. Selected keywords included "nursing," "nurse," and "nursing staff," and included words were "long-term care settings," "geriatric hospital," and "nursing home." Text mining, opinion mining, and social network analysis were conducted. RESULTS: After the COVID-19 pandemic, the frequency of keywords increased about 1.5 times compared to before. In March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, the negative phrase "be infected" ranked number one, resulting in a sharp 8% rise in the percentage of negative words in that month. The related words that have risen in rank significantly, or were newly ranked in the Top 30 after the pandemic, were related with COVID-19. CONCLUSION: The public began to realize the role of nursing staff in the prevention and management of mass infection in NHs and the importance of nursing staff after the pandemic. Further studies should examine the perceptions of those who have received nursing services and include a wide range of foreign channels.

Confidence in delegation and leadership of registered nurses in long-term-care hospitals.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Effective delegation improves job satisfaction, responsibility, productivity and development. The ageing population demands more nurses in long-term-care hospitals. Delegation and leadership promote cooperation among nursing staff. However, little research describes nursing delegation and leadership style. We investigated the relationship between registered nurses' delegation confidence and leadership in Korean long-term-care hospitals. METHODS: Our descriptive correlational design sampled 199 registered nurses from 13 long-term-care hospitals in Korea. Instruments were the Confidence and Intent to Delegate Scale and Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. RESULTS: Confidence in delegation significantly aligned with current-unit clinical experience, length of total clinical-nursing experience, delegation-training experience and leadership. Transformational leadership was the most statistically significant factor influencing delegation confidence. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT: When effective delegation integrates with efficient leadership, staff can deliver optimal care to long-term-care patients.