Objective Tuberculosis (TB) patients are discharged after confirming their non-infective status. However, elder-care facilities often refuse to admit discharged TB patients. As no study has investigated anxiety among elder-care facility employees, we aimed to identify anxiety-associated factors among elder-care facility employees regarding the post-discharge admission of TB patients who have completed inpatient treatment.Methods Among the 74 elder-care facilities under the jurisdiction of the Ibaraki Public Health Center in Osaka, Japan, (we excludes facilities that provided only daycare services), and invited all 3,213 employees of the remaining 70 facilities to participate in this questionnaire-based survey. Copies of an anonymous, self-administered questionnaire were mailed to the manager of each facility and were further distributed among employees. Responses were initially collected individually and subsequently directly collected from each facility by a public health nurse at the center. The questionnaire items included: the presence/absence of anxiety, resistance, and/or a feeling of difficulty about admitting TB patients who had completed inpatient treatment ("anxiety"), age, sex, occupation, years of work, total experience caring for TB patients, and knowledge of TB. The correlation between the presence/absence of anxiety and each item was analyzed using the chi-square test.Results Completed questionnaires were obtained from 1,950 employees (response rate, 60.7%), of which 1,290 without missing data for relevant items were analyzed. Anxiety was present in 987 (76.5%) respondents. A significantly higher proportion of anxiety was observed in relation to the occupation (care workers and helpers), experience of caring for TB patients (respondents without such experience), and among employees who incorrectly answered questions on knowledge of TB, such as the infectiveness of TB patients after discharge, their management, and the risk of developing TB following infection.Conclusion The study identified anxiety-associated factors among employees of elder-care facilities about admitting TB patients who had completed inpatient treatment for TB. Therefore, anxiety-mitigating environments may need to be established for such employees to facilitate the admission of discharged TB patients and their smooth return of patients to their pre-TB lives.
Keywords: admitting patients; anxiety; elder-care facilities; infection; public health center; tuberculosis.