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We observed a dog visitation program in a geriatric retirement home in Japan, to obtain quantitative data on the human-dog interactions. Seven volunteer handlers and seven adult pet dogs were divided into two groups. Each group visited the home on one of two activity days each month for 18 months. The program was conducted in a consistent way and the features of it did not change during the course of the study. Five to 12 senior residents, among a total of 31 (9 men and 22 women, 16 with normal/mild and 15 with moderate/severe disabilities in activities of daily living: ADL), voluntarily participated in each activity day. We focused on each dog as a target, using a focal animal sampling method, and monitored the seating arrangements of the residents. We found that both the residents and dog handlers contributed to the interaction. Affiliative physical contact was predominantly used as an interaction tool. Neither sex, ADL level, nor the rate of adjacent vacant seats affected the frequency of each resident's isolation. However, less disability in ADL and a higher rate of adjacent vacant seats facilitated more resident-dog interactions. The dogs more frequently initiated behavior toward female residents than toward males, but the sex of the residents was unrelated to the frequency of the dogs' receiving and reciprocating behaviors with the residents. Despite Japan being historically and culturally different from Western countries, the program worked well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an 80-bed fee-based retirement home with nursing care, the dispatched-pharmacist has provided prescription recommendations to visiting physicians based on pathogen identification using Gram staining as part of an antimicrobial stewardship program. Thus, we evaluated the effects of pharmacist-supported antimicrobial stewardship. We calculated the total number of all antimicrobials and macrolides, fluoroquinolones, and cephalosporins prescriptions per 100 residents per month at the retirement home from January 2013 to December 2017. Using log-transformed monthly resident numbers with an offset before and after the intervention, we performed Poisson regression analyses that adjusted for monthly mean age. Interrupted time series analyses (ITSA) were conducted to examine the changes in the incidence rate ratios for the baseline and slope before and after the intervention. The total number of all antimicrobial prescriptions per 100 residents per month from 2013 to 2017 was 14.10, 18.51, 10.59, 5.41, and 3.90, respectively. Although there was a significant pre-intervention increase in the total number of all antimicrobial prescriptions, the intervention was followed by a significant decrease. There was also a significant reduction in the slope. ITSA of the changes in the prescription of macrolides and fluoroquinolones showed that there were significant pre-intervention increase and followed by a significant post-intervention decrease in the slope. There was no significant change in cephalosporin prescriptions by the intervention. Our study shows that pharmacist-supported AS can reduce antimicrobial prescriptions in a retirement home. Nevertheless, further studies are needed to collect and analyse more data on similar interventions., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None., (Copyright © 2020 Japanese Society of Chemotherapy and The Japanese Association for Infectious Diseases. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)