Ryan Ginstrom wrote:

> "Eric Takabayashi" <etakajp@yahoo.co.jp> wrote in message
> news:3F8AC120.9B96410@yahoo.co.jp...
> >
> > http://tinyurl.com/qqlm
>
> > 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.
>
> The problem is, shouldn't that emergency care include paramedics? If
> paramedics can't even administer CPR, you're gonna get a lot more "mamonaku
> shibou shimashita" on presentation.

That too, but the study covered people who arrived alive, whom the study deems
had "better than" 50 percent chance of survival:

http://tinyurl.com/qqlm

The Shimazaki team studied the quality of emergency care by computing the
estimated chances of survival of 1,432 people who had been admitted to
emergency rooms but later died.

To make the computation, the team used information obtained through the
survey, including the seriousness of the injury, level of consciousness, the
state of breathing and blood pressure. The team excluded patients whose heart
and lungs had already stopped by the time they were admitted to emergency
centers.

The Shimazaki team found that 719 of the 1,432 people had a better than 50
percent chance of survival when they were admitted.

In addition, the team determined that 546 of the 719 people, excluding those
who were older than 80 and those who had suffered acute subdural hematoma,
could have been saved, indicating that 38.1 percent of the total number of
people who died in emergency rooms could have survived.

The team also found that people who had a more than 80 percent chance of
survival accounted for nearly a quarter of the deaths, while those who had
more than 90 percent of survival chance accounted for more than 10 percent of
the total. These results suggest that inadequate emergency care may have
allowed many patients to die unnecessarily.

The study also revealed marked difference in the quality of medical care in
various emergency centers.

The team found that all the patients who died at three of the emergency
centers had had more than 50 percent chance of survival, while 12 centers kept
the death rate of patients with more than a 50 percent chance of survival
under 20 percent.

> But yes, the emergency rooms are a joke, too. Usually they get some scrub
> doctor in there fresh out of medical school, who doesn't know what the hell
> is going on, to basically say "ok, come back tomorrow."
>
> > * 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.
>
> Japanese hospitals are some of the most depressing places I have ever seen.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Ryan Ginstrom