Abstract

Background: Sick child care is a form of nursing care provided temporarily by nursery staff and nurses for sick children when they cannot be cared for by their parents, for reasons such as having to work. To facilitate sick child care according to the type of household, we investigated single-mother households and double-income nuclear families, and clarified their usage of such care and relevant needs.
Methods: The study subjects comprised 14 single mothers, and 131 individuals from double-income nuclear families. We investigated their usage of sick child care, perceived benefits of such care, and carerelated requests.
Results: For both types of family, the mean age of care service users was less than 3 years, and most of them had infectious diseases. In the single-mother group, more than 50% of the subjects were non-regular employees. Compared with the double-income group, the single-mother group showed significantly higher percentages of people with a low income and those using the systems for reducing care fees (P<0.0001, P<0.0243). The latter group also exhibited a higher percentage of individuals with anxiety due to the possibility of their dismissal from work caused by taking time off (P=0.0238).Furthermore, a higher percentage of single mothers than those from double-income households considered sick child care-related guidance to be beneficial (P<0.021).
Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that those systems support these women for job security and child raising. The systems for reducing care fees will have no significance if sick child care is inaccessible due to reaching the maximum capacity of children, and individuals without access to such care may suffer from job insecurity and/or insufficient child raising support. Hence, there is a need to increase the number of children who can be accepted by care facilities.