Nagoya hospital pictures

Here are some photos of the hospital that I work in!

Main entrance - under some construction on the left. This building is a brand-new gorgeous-looking outpatient clinic center.

Patient ward - the hospital has over 1000 beds!

Another angle

Differences between the US and Japan – Hospital medicine

In Japan (and like most places in Asia), patients stay in hospital MUCH longer than in the US for similar condition. For example, average hospital stay for a woman with a regular vaginal delivery without complication is 6-7 days, compared with 36-48 hrs in the US! Another example: I was told that a patient with an elective lap chole (laproscopic cholecystectomy) in Japan has an average stay of 3 days. In the US, the same type of patient can go home the same day! I feel that in Japan, the hospital really baby sits patients well and will not discharge patients until they feel 100% physically. In the US, on the other hand, as long as the patients are stable and show some early sign of improvement, they are discharged right away. I’m no public health expert, but I am pretty sure the skyrocketing health care cost in the US has something to do with it; the longer the patients stay in the hospital, the more money it costs BOTH the patients AND the hospital.

There are definitely more differences than I described above. I just put up something that was very obvious to me. I shall discuss it further later.

Cardiac Surgery

For my first two weeks of rotation in Nagoya, I worked in Cardiac surgery dept. I mainly worked with two main surgeons, Dr Usui and Dr Ueda. Both spoke good English, and they were extremely nice to me. They were really interested in my experiences in the US as a med student. As far as the cases go, I was lucky enough that every day during the two weeks there is a different operative case every day. They range from CABG (coronary artery bypass graft), valve replacement, aortic dissection, and thoracic aortic aneurysm repair. Unlike my two weeks of CT surgery in the US, where most cases were just CABG, it’s really an equal mixture of aortic arch/artery repair and CABG. I found aortic repair much more interesting (but also more challenging) than CABG. It definitely requires fine operative skills from a cardiac surgeon. There was one case where the entire surgery went for 19 hrs (!!) until 5am the next day because the whole descending thoracic aorta was reconstructed. Fortunately, they let me go home early at 4pm in the afternoon J

First post - Intro

Hello!

Welcome to my blog! This is a long-awaited first post in my Japan clerkship blog. I am in Japan for the month of February, doing two weeks of cardiac surgery and two weeks of surgical oncology. I have been in Nagoya for about 9 days, working in the Cardiac surgery department here. So far the experience has been great. It's very interesting to see how the US and Japan medical education systems differ. I will definitely talk more about it later.

Thanks for reading my blog! I will start posting more often and will put some pictures on here soon!

Phil