This is my new battle field, the ED of Tohoku Medical and Pharmaceutical University Hospital.
This brand new medical school is founded for the first time in 37 years in Japan.
This university is the private one and the owner decided to buy and use a little bit old hospital as a university hospital, which has already existed for a long time in Sendai City.
Up until last fiscal year, this hospital has had less responsibility about caring emergency or acutely ill patients, but in order to educate medical students in near future, this old mind has to be changed.
On April 1st, I move to this hospital as a director of emergency department to create completely new ED before medical school students will begin their clinical clerkship about 3 years later.
Since the current ED(photo) has very limited space and equipment, we cannot provide satisfying treatment for several patients at the same time.
I’m an only emergency physician in this hospital now. That means that every doctor in this hospital has to do some sort of emergency practice. But some docs are not confident with such practice. Some nurses, too.
My current mission is not only to build new ED clinical setting appropriate for emergency and critical care (ECC) but also to do enough education about ECC and make practitioners confident with emergency medicine.
One feature of our ED is the ultrasound machine (picture above). This new US machine is brought into our ED in early April. We can do ophthalmology ultrasound exam with this. It is designed for emergency use and has only one touch screen for operation, neither buttons nor dials. It is very easy to clean the screen. Wiping, that’s it!