The Quantitative Effect of Community-Based Participatory Research on Building Teamwork among Medical and Long-Term Care Services in Rural Japan: The Tome Medical Project

Background: Comprehensive teamwork among medical experts, nursing-care experts and non-experts are essential in promoting medical and nursing care services in a community for the well-being of all residents. For accomplishment, inter-professional workshops have been conducted in various places throughout Japan. However, only a few studies have evaluated the effect of these activities, and most of them included only medical experts. Thus, we launched a community-based participatory research (CBPR), consisted of serial workshops in Tome City, a northeastern rural area in Japan. To our knowledge, this is the first study to quantitively evaluate the effect of CBPR. Methods: We held workshops including small lectures at a frequency of 1-2 times a month during six months. The participants discussed issues of medical or long-term care in Tome City. At baseline and the final workshops, we distributed to the participants questionnaires where they graded scores on the quality of cooperation among medical and nursing-care services in Tome. The summed scores were used as our main outcome. The higher scores mean better integration. Results: The median (range) of the scores for overall participants were 101.0 (66.0) at baseline, and 89.0 (76.0) at the end, with no statistical difference observed (p=0.50). Similar results were observed when stratified by number of times attending to other workshops and medical or nursing-care profession. Conclusion: No improvement in collaboration was observed after serial workshops in 6 months. Further discussions would be needed how we can promote better collaboration among professionals and citizens for the achievement of residents’ well-being.