Backgrounds: Responding adequately to emergency needs in the initiation phase of visiting nursing is an important requirement for planning lifestyle stability and continuing home care. First, emergency visits by a visiting nurse to new users of visiting nursing services were divided into the first week (1st to 7th day of discharge) and second week (8th to 15th day of discharge) to investigate relationships between the conditions of the emergency visit.

Method: 95 new users of 14 visiting nursing stations and above in October 2015 to September 2016 who received emergency care in the period between the 1st and 15th days of discharge were surveyed for the nature of the emergency and their social resources. The emergency response was analyzed by a chi-square test, and a logistic regression analysis was performed to investigate correlations between parameters with the emergency visit by time since starting visiting nursing.

Results: There were significantly more emergency phone calls and visits in the first week (P < 0.02). The associated factors that affected the emergency visit in the first week were dementia grade III or above (odds ratio 10.09: 95% confidence interval: 1.27-81.11) and performing medical procedures in the second week (3.87: 1.06-14.12).

Conclusions: The results revealed that emergency visits were more frequent in the first week, suggesting the need to make nurse visits twice weekly or more and provide care to users of dementia grade III or above in the first week and then provide medical procedures in the second week.