Employee driven approach to “knowledge explication” in elderly care service

Abstract

The amount of costs for long-term care is increasing because of aging society. It is important to improve quality of care process. We focus on sharing the knowledge of care process in care facility to achieve the goal. There are some issues to share the knowledge. (1) The knowledge is implicit on the care workers. (2) It is difficult to unite the knowledge as world standard because of its variety. We proposed the methodology of “knowledge explication” to overcome these issues. The methodology is (1) to explicate the knowledge of care process by employees in care facility. (2) It is performed on each care facility so they can explicate the facility-specific knowledge of care process. We applied the methodology to two care facilities and evaluate it. The explicated knowledge is 1.8 times more than the knowledge from textbook. We also confirmed the efficiency of the methodology by questionnaire to the participants.