In Japan, the quality of service provided in elder care facilities is drawing special attention after the enforcement of the Long-term Care Insurance Act in 2000. This study is aimed at proposing a structure model on improvement in quality of welfare service and clearing a research trend on welfare industry in Japan by systematic review. At first, Key words regarding to the quality of welfare service were taken by related papers. And then we discussed those key words using KJ method and developed the structure model composed of four areas and three-layer structure. Second, a literature search was exhaustively performed with 12 keywords on Cinii and Google Scholar databases for papers published between 1991 and 2010. From the papers returned by the search, the 63 original papers were examined. This study showed that the staff’s care burden and nursing consciousness were featured themes. On the other hand, there were few researches as a customer satisfaction or information management. In addition, these researches only considered short-term effects.
