This study was conducted to investigate risk factors for senile dementia as well as care givers' stresses and thier needs for nursing care. It was done using a retrospective survey. A convenience sample of 100 senile dementia patients and 120 normal elders in a rural area was used. The tools used in the study were the MMSE-K(Mini-Mental State Examination-Korea) for dementia screening test and a questionaire developed by the research team. Data were collected through home visits by Community Health Practitioners. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, T-test, and Chi-square test. The findings are as follows: 1. There were significant differences in age, marital status, and religions between the two groups. 2. There was a significant difference in smoling behavior between the two groups. 3. There was a significant difference in past history of cancer between groups. 4. There was a significant difference in past and present elderfamily relationship between the two groups. 5. There were significant differences in intellectual activities, assuming major role in famliy and seeking other's help in daily life troubles between the two groups. 6. There were significant differences in stress factors such as child problem, family conflict, health problem and illegal behavior between the two groups. 7. The major problems out by families in caring for dementia patient were catastrophic reactions, dirtiness, mood change, devouring and tremor. The most serious problems faced by families was dirtiness, with catastrophic reactions, sleep distrubance, changeableness, and a suspcio-usness following. The care givers expressed chronic fatigue, anxiety, tension, depression, disorder in daily life, shamefulness, blame from neighbours and guiltiness. 8. There is need for geriatric hospitals, nursing homes, burden sharing, and counselling or education for family care givers. A replicate study in the urban area is recommended to validate the findings of this study. To explore the impact of stress in life and 'han' on senile dementia, a qualitative study is recommended.

This study was conducted to test validity of related factors and characteristics of 98 Nursing Diagnosis identified in a previous study by the Korean Nurses Association. Data for this study was collected from 892 nurses in eight teaching hospitals located in Seoul using a cross sectional survey method. Each participating hospital was asked to produce at least 10 cases for every nursing diagnosis. There were 7,422 responses out of a possible 7,840. Out of the 7,422 responses 26 were discarded due to incompleteness. Data were analyzed using SAS. The result of the study shows that most of the related factors and characteristics for each of the 98 nursing diagnosis were ranked at more than 3.5 point out of 5 point Likert scale in terms of significance. Through this study the related factors and characteristics of the 98 nursing diagnosis identificance. Through this study the related factors and characteristics of the 98 nursing diagnosis identified through literature review were validated by experts in nursing diagnosis. These validated related factors and characteristics will be utilized for computerization of the nursing diagnosis process.

The problem of care of patients and families with Alzheimer's disease has become a conscious raising social policy issue in Korea. The government of the Republic of Korea has become cognizant of the situation and has begun searching for ways to remedy it. Thus, there is a need for a comprehensive understanding of the situation in which patients and their families are struggling and the enormous problems of care. With a realization of the urgent need, this study was done to investigate the situation and the care needs of families with patients with Alzheimer's Disease, and to compare the effectiveness of services utilized by the families in terms of cost and effects on patient's conditions and on family live. The Subjects for the study were 29 families with hospitalized patients, 25 families utilizing hospital outpatient clinics, 14 families utilizing day care facilities, and 16 families with homebound patients. A total of 84 families were interviewed by four trained interviewers using structured and semistructured questionnaires. The data produced from these interviews included: the patient's stage of Alzheimer's disease, patient's bizarre behavior, hours spent on patient care per day, family burden and quality of life, direct and indirect costs encountered in the care of patients, and the families' evaluation of the effectiveness of the services received. The data were analyzed to determine the relationships between family charactersistics, patient's conditions and services utilization. The effectiveness of each of the service entities was assessed through families evaluation and hoped for service and comparisons were made between services in terms of the cost-effectiveness ratios. After initial comparison of cost-effectiveness ratios, further analysis was done to compare between groups for incremental effectiveness for each incremental unit of cost to determine the most cost-effective service entities. The findings of the study are as fellows: 1. The choice of living arrangement and the types of services are a function of the stage of Alzheimer's condition and the economic status of the family. 2. Comparision of the cost of care showed that most expenses were encountered in by families with hospitalization, families using outpatient services, and families using day care services in that order. The least expense was involved in the care of homebound patients. The economic burden felt by families was in the same order as expenses. 3. The average number of hours spent on daily patient care was 9.9 hours for the outpatient clinic users, 9.7 hours for homebound patients, and 5.4 hours for day care users. 4. There were significant differences in the patient's conditions(CDRL), bizarre behaviors and the families's burden by living arrangement and/or types of service. However, no significant difference was found between groups in the family's quality of life. 5. The families rated the services of day care center as most effective for the care of the patients and families, except for a few families who had experienced some improvement in the patient's conditions. The outpatient clinic users expressed psychological comforts mainly in that the patient was being taken care of. For those hospitalized patients, families expressed the comfort of being relieved of the burden of care and that the patient is being professionally cared for. Form the analysis of the costs, hours of patient care, patient's bizarre behaviors, family's quality of life and burdens, and family's evaluation of services, it is concluded that up to the mid stage of Alzheimer's condition, the utilization of day care center services is found to be the most cost-effective, and toward the end stage of the Alzheimer's disease, it is hoped that there will be a establishment of long term or short term in-patient facilities for the protection of patients and preservation of the integrity of families for less cost. Thus, it was concluded that the family centered system of care is the most effective for Korea with systematic support systems developed for the care of patients and their families according to the needs of families as the patient's condition deteriorates.

Advanced countries such as the USA and Japan are eagerly seeking ways to improve health and welfare of the elderly. One of the services is home health care service using the telephone. Various types of services using the telephone have been developed, improved and are being utilized ranging from the basic consulting to emergency response systems in the area of health care for the elderly. A demonstration project was launched to study the feasibility of a consulting system and telemedicine for the elderly using the public phone system in Korea. For this project, a gathering site for the elderly was selected and those who visited this place were interviewed to find out what kinds of services they wanted and what kind of system they needed to provide the required services. Based on the users' requests and the surrounding environment, a telephone consulting facility was established at the Research Institute of Nursing Science at Seoul National University and consulting personnel was recruited, trained and posted at the center. An Application program for home health care nurses to use when they visited the patients at their homes was developed. This system operates on a notebook Computer and allows nurses to communicate with a doctor at a local hospital through a modem and telecommunication line. These systems were implemented for three months and problems which developed during operation of the systems were identified and progressively modified. Through system evaluation, it was found that a consulting system using phone service will be an invaluable system for the welfare of the elderly in the future. But in order to meet the elderly's need, more services than mere consultation are needed. That is, communication with physicians and hospitals are needed. Thus, when there is any need for physicians' attention, physicians or hospitals should be contacted directly. Similarly for telemedicine, when the home health care nurse visits elderly patients she can assess the patient's problem and provide nursing care, access a physician or hospital to refer her patient to or consult directly using the telecommunication the system. The above mentioned system is a basic form of futuristic telemedicine for the elderly and those who have chronic disease problems. This kind of system will be of great value when it is used on the national information super-high ways in the future. In order to get to that stage, of course, this project needs great improvement in the technical, academic, and legal aspects.

Even though Korean medical law stipulates that number of patients attended by a nurse is 2.5 for hospitalization and 30 for ambulatory care, the number of patients cared by a nurse per day is much greater than the standard prescribed by the medical law. Current nursing productivity of nurses is not desirable unless the quality of care considered. Moreover, nursing manpower staffing based on neither current nurses' productivity nor standard of medical law cannot respond properly to dynamic situation of the medical services. As for the nurse scheduling, the critical problem of it in the hospital is determining the day-to-day shift assignments for each nurse for the specified period in a way that satisfies the given requirements of the hospital. Nurse scheduling, however, involves many factors and requirements, manual scheduling requires much time and effort to produce an adequate schedule. Under these backgrounds, the necessity of more efficient management of nursing manpower occupying 1/3 of total hospital workers has been recognized by many nursing administrators. This study was performed to develop a system computerizing nurse staffing and scheduling based on the patient classification. As a preliminary step for the system development, nursing workload in a secondary hospital was measured from Sep. to Oct. 1994. On the grounds of this result, computerization of nurse staffing and scheduling was proceeded with three options. First one is based on the current medical law. Second one is based on the assigned number of nursing staff. And the last is based on the request by patient classification. Computer languages used in this study were MS Visual Basic 3.0 for the staffing and Access 2.0 for the scheduling, respectively. Prospective users may operate this system easily because icons and mouse are used for easier graphic user interface and reducing the need for typing efforts. This system can help nurse administrators manage nursing manpower efficiently and nurses develop quick and easy schedule generation and allow more time for the patient care.

Neural networks have recently attracted considerable attention in the field of classification and other areas. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate an experiment using back-propagation neural network model applied to nursing diagnosis. The network's structure has three layers; one input layer for representing signs and symptoms and one output layer for nursing diagnosis as well as one hidden layer. The first prototype of a nursing diagnosis systern for patients with stomach cancer was developed with 254 nodes for the input layer and 20 nodes for the output layer of 20 nursing diagnoses, by utilizing learning data set collected from 118 patients with stomach cancer. It showed a hitting ratio of .93 when the model was developed with 20,000 times of learning, 6 nodes of hidden layer, 0.5 of momentum and 0.5 of learning coefficient. The system was primarily designed to be an aid in the clinical reasoning process. It was intended to simplify the use of nursing diagnoses for clinical practitioners. In order to validate the developed model, a set of test data from 20 patients with stomach cancer was applied to the diagnosis system. The data for 17 patients were concurrent with the result produced from the nursing diagnosis system which shows the hitting ratio of 85%. Future research is needed to develop a system with more nursing diagnoses and an evaluation process, and to expand the system to be applicable to other groups of patients.

Due to the rapid socioeconomic develoment and the introduction of the national health insurance system, the general population's need for health care and utilization of health care services have increassed dramatically. As a result of this change. Korea is experiencing a shortage of health care facilities and health manpower, and this leads long waiting line at doctor's offices. One of the solutions of this problem could be home health care system for those who have minor health related problems. With this background, this study was conducted to look at the feasibility of a home-based prenatal care system using information superhighway and nursing informatics specialists. With the home-based prenatal care system, the pregnant woman checks her blood pressure, tests her urine for sugar and protein, and measures her body weight at home and sends the information to a hospital computer via the information networks such as public telephone line and information superhighway. Nursing informatics specialist at the hospital will go through each patient record and screen those who have abnormal values and notify them to see a doctor as soon as possible. Besides telemonitoring features, the proposed system will include tele-education capabilities for the patients so that patient can learn whatever they need to know ragarding the prenatal care via information networks. If this system develops and operates, patient can save time in terms of travel to and from the hospital and waiting time in the hospital. And the health care institute can utilize its resource more efficiently.

This study investigated the effects of education program conducted through individual home visit by CHPs, which was developed by the operational research technique for families of dementia patients. (Yeo Shin Hong et al, 1994) The study was conducted in the form of a primary experimental design with 43 people as subjects, including dementia patients and family member in several Myon areas of Chungcheong Namdo between June 10 and August 20, 1994. The data was collected by questionnaires through the home visit by the CHPs. The results of study are as follows. 1. There is no difference in the quality of life between before and after the education program. 2. Role stress 'before the education program' was significantly different than 'after the education program'. 3. There was no difference in the feeling of burden between before and after the education program. 4. There was a significant difference in the abnormal behaviors of patients between before and after the education program. 5. The knowledge of dementia by the patient's family increased significantly after the educaion program, compared to that of 'before the education program'. 6. There was a significant difference in the attitude of family members toward the education program on dementia between before and after the education program. 7. The results of analysis on the coefficient relationship of various variables showed that the age of patients and family members have a significant correlation with role stress(p=.01). 8. In the subjective evaluation of family members on changes in actual nursing actions and the improvement of knowledge and technique in terms of daily living, (including abnormal behavior of patients, adjustment of environment for patients, activity programs for patients, communication technique with patients, ensuring the safety of patients, clothing, meals and elimination, 60-65% of family members responded that their knowledge had increased. As for improvement in techniques for each item, the technique for communication with patients showed the greatest improvement while the action program method for patients showed the least change. As for the nursing service provided to patients, most respondents showed a positive change. The specific items for which more than 80% respondents answered positively were as follows: recognizing the demand of patients, getting patients to do simple house works, talking softly and gently, removing dangerous things, preparing comfortable clothes that are easy to put on and take off, and limiting water consumption at night. As a result of study, the following suggestions can be made. The purpose of the study was to examine the effect of an education program developed and applied for dementia patients and family members in the community. This needs to be compared with a similar study conducted in the urban setting. In addition, a community service program (ex: nursing horn and shelter) including the applicaion of the education program should be developed and the study done to investigate its effect.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to project supply and demand for registered nurses to the year 2015 and to make recommendations regarding nurse manpower planning for the 21st century in Korea.
METHODS
The supply of nurses was predicted using a baseline projection and demographic methods. The demand for nurses was forecasted by the derivative method.
RESULTS
Projections indicate there will be an oversupply of nurses based on the current productivity. However, there will be under-supply if predictions are based on the standard for nursing staff established by the medical law and the optimal productivity derived by the patient classification system.
CONCLUSION
Korea needs more practicing nurses. One way to increase the number of practicing nurses is to increase the number of graduates. However, considering the low retention rate of nurses, a better way to solve the nurse shortage problem is to develop strategies to recruit and retain nurses.

PURPOSE: This study was conducted to study on 1) What is nursing students' experience of ethical problems involving nursing practice? 2) What is nursing students' experience of using ethical decision-making models?
METHOD
In order to answer these two questions, we selected 97 senior baccalaureate nursing students from two Korean universities using a conceptual framework and method of content analysis.
RESULT
From 97 ethical problems emerged five content categories, the largest being ethical problems involving health professionals (69%); the basic nature of the nursing students' experience of ethical problems consisted of conflict, resolution, and rationale; 94% of the students stated that using an ethical decision-making model was helpful.
CONCLUSION
Although additional research is needed, these findings have important implications for nursing ethics education and practice.

This study was conducted to determine the prevalence rate of adverse reactions to latex gloves. The study compared allergic reactions to ordinary latex gloves with four types of hypoallergenic gloves among operating room nurses at a teaching hospital in Seoul, Korea. Data were collected from 63 operating room nurses by a questionnaire and direct observation of a skin prick test. Among respondents, 25 nurses with adverse reactions to latex gloves were selected for the skin prick and exposure tests with five latex gloves (1 ordinary glove, and 4 hypoallergenic gloves) using a repeated measures design of counterbalancing method. Study Results are as follows: (1) The response rate of the questionnaire was 96.8%, and the prick test was performed in 61 out of 63 nurses. (2) Common symptoms of allergic reactions to latex gloves were rash (49.2%), skin itching (44.3%), dizziness (31.1%), and eye itching (26.2%). (3) The prevalence rate of adverse reactions was 80.3%, and that of latex allergy was 9.8%. (4) Atopic subjects had more latex allergy than the non-atopics. (5) There was no difference in the incidence rate of latex allergy among the five gloves by the skin prick test. But with the skin exposure test, ordinary latex gloves had a higher incidence rate of latex allergy than the hypoallergenic gloves (p<0.0001).

The purpose of this study was to verify the validity of the Patient Severity Classification Tool by examining the correlations between the APACHE III and the Patient Severity Classification Tool and to propose admission criteria to the ICU. The instruments used for this study were the APACHE III developed by Knaus and thePatient Severity Classification Tool developed by Korean Clinical Nurses Association. Data was collected from the 156 Medical ICU patients during their first 24 hours of admission at the Seoul National University Hospital by three trained Medical ICU nurses from April 20 to August 31 1999. Data were analyzed using the frequency, X2, Wilcoxon rank sum test, and Spearman rho. There was statistically significant correlations between the scores of the APACHE III and the Patient Severity Classification Tool. Mortality rate was increased as patients classification of severity in both the APACHE III and the Patient Severity Classification Tool scored higher. The Patient Severity Classification Tool was proved to be a valid and reliable tool, and a useful tool as one of the severity predicting factors, ICU admission criteria, information sharing between ICUs, quality evaluations of ICUs, and ICU nurse staffing. 1) This paper was awarded the first prize at the Seoul National Hospital Nursing Department Research Contest.

This study amis for examines the actual physical symptom and stress in caregivers of patients with cerebrovascular disease. The data were collected by a survey conducted from August to September, 1997 which included 65 caregivers of cerebrovascular disease patient in 4 hospitals located in Seoul. The caregiver's stress was measured by Choi(1992)'s instrument and the actual physical symptoms were investigated. The data were analyzed using ANOV, Scheffe test, pearson correlation coefficient and stepwise multiple regression. The results were as follows : 1. The mean number of caregiver's physical symptom was 3.5. There were significantly higher number of physical symptom in women, those of who have a religious affiliation, those of two perceive their own health status perceived s bad, and those of two perceived their patients disease condition as serious than in their counterparts. Also, the number of caregiver's physical symptom was significantly higher in caregivers whose patients have a paralysis symptom and the disease onset as spontaneous. 2. The average of caregiver's stress was 57.9. The caregiver's stress was the highest in between the ages of 50 and 59. There were also significantly higher level of stress in women, those of two perceived the disease condition of their patient as serious than in counterparts. 3. The most common caregiver's physical symptom was fatigue(87.7%). This was followed by insomnia(58.5%) and muscle (47.4%). 4. Caregiver's physical symptom was positively correlated with caregiver's stress and negatively correlated with patient's activity of daily life. 5. The most important variable affecting the caregiver's physical symptom was patient's activity of daily life which accounted for 12.7% of the total variance in stepwise multiple regression analysis. The most important variable affecting the caregiver's stress was the patient disease condition perceived by the caregiver that accounted for 12.1% of the total variance.