The main reason of this dead period was due to dysfunction of the World Press Blog system. I could not figure out how to fix it and then I left the problem as it was. Recently my blog has recovered after updating the system to the new version. Ironically the problem seemed to be very simple.
The second reason that my silent period was so long is because of much less free time to write blog. Up until the end of this March, I had been working at Tohoku University Hospital in Sendai City as both an emergency physician and a simulation educator for more than a decade. Sendai is the biggest city in Tohoku (north-east) area, which has more than a million people. And then in this April I have moved to my new workplace, “Tohoku Medical and Pharmaceutical University (TMPU) Hospital” in the same city as only one emergency physician in the hospital. This is a transforming event in my life.
My mission is to establish a completely new emergency center in the current hospital, which had been a relatively small local hospital of about 400 beds with neither emergency room nor emergency physicians and to create a whole new culture about emergency and disaster medicine. This hospital is located very close to the north-east coast of main land hit by gigantic tsunami in 2011.
Here I want to explain about the outline and perspective of this new medical university and hospital in Japan. TMPU is the 81st medical college in Japan, and interestingly enough the period from the last one established in Okinawa to TMPU is 37 years. It’s quite long. Japanese government had stopped to build a new medical school in 1979 because of controlling and limiting the numbers of physicians intentionally.
Despite the government policy, the shortage of physicians has been a big concern around Tohoku area for many years. In addition to this preexisted imbalance of physician resources, the 2011 huge earthquake and Tsunami disaster occurred in Tohoku area made this situation worse. Nowadays physician shortage makes it much more difficult for rural hospitals to hire attending physicians and then some hospitals have to stop clinical practice of some specialties. Not only the shortage of attending physicians in hospitals, but some elderly outpatient-clinic physicians in charge of local medical care are retiring.
Because of the urgent need of getting physicians in Tohoku area, Japanese government eventually decided to establish a brand new medical college in 37 years. TMPU encourages new medical students to being physicians dedicated to Tohoku area in the future. That means physicians of TMPU should also commit themselves to teaching and coaching them and being role models of them.
That’s the story of my new workplace. Because medical education, especially simulation about emergency medicine has been my favorite field for many years, I’m very excited about this new mission.
Since I’m only one emergency physician this year, I have to do bunch of stuff every day. Even worse, our hospital has few residents, therefore I’m in charge of almost of all small stuff. On the other hand, several general physicians and a nurse practitioner help me deal with emergency patients and caring admitted patients. I can’t thank them enough. I really appreciate their contribution to our emergency center.
Next year one more well-trained emergency physician will come to my hospital. That will make things much better.
In order to make our emergency center team much stronger, I create the code for our team. I’m really excited about developing super positive team.
