http://tinyurl.com/qqlm

Adequate emergency care could have saved 40 percent of
patients' lives

Sunday, October 12, 2003

About 40 percent of the people who died at emergency
medical centers across Japan could have been saved if
they had received adequate emergency care, according to
a recent study by the Ministry of Health, Labor and
Welfare.

[snip]

[Kyorin University professor Shuji Shimazaki] says it
is necessary to improve the overall quality of
emergency care and the state should eventually
establish a central hospital that specializes in
external injuries with which to evaluate the level of
emergency care provided across the country.

Experts say Japan is about 30 years behind the United
States in emergency medical care.

[end]

Which is precisely what I guessed from my experience in
Japanese emergency medicine, the damned place looks
like the local hospital* I remember from my childhood
in a rural Hawaii community. It's a bad sign when the
flagship hospital of the city (it was either the
kokumin byouin or the shimin byouin) has ONE rookie
doctor on duty in their so called "emergency room" at
night and ONE nurse roaming around with her cell phone
around her neck, and they must TELEPHONE a radiologist
to come in and open the X-ray room (as in ONE) to take
an X-ray, and must TELEPHONE a pharmacist to come in
and open the pharmacy (it looked like a storeroom) just
to get some medicated pads to put on a swollen ankle.

I also live a few blocks away from the offices of the
physicians' association, with a fair sized nursing
school next to it. They have a night children's
hospital, with service to maybe 11 p.m. It is an
appreciated service which we have used at least twice
for fevers. But neither they nor any other hospitals I
have had experience with, have any modern medical
equipment available at night. It is mostly literally
roaming through darkened halls, searching for personnel
on duty, just to be told to go to a doctor the next
day.

* My hometown hospital was overhauled about 20 years
ago, and despite being in a town of less than 10,000,
looks more like "E.R." than anything I have ever seen
in Japan outside of fiction.

Whoa. 12:09 a.m.: Kyou no Dekigoto just reported that a
nurse at Fukuyama National Hospital was stabbed Monday
afternoon with a fruit knife by an elderly man, who was
arrested for attempted murder.

I hope she had better care.