Abstract
Emergency medical services are important for everybody in the common persuits of peaceful everyday life. Emergency facilities at present in Japan are classified into three grades, namely, first-aid, secondary and tertiary service. The purpose of this study is to obtain the basic information mainly on tertiary service facilities in order to improve the planning of facilities in future, by investigating and examining operational situation of the facilities and characteristics of patients who paid the visits to them. Four hospitals, each of which is introducing different operational policies, were selected and investigated. The results of analysis are summarized as follows: 1) The screening of the admitted patients is found to be very difficult even in tertiary hospitals. 2) Number of male patients exceeds female ones but there are no particular concentration in every age groups. Acute internal medical cases are shown more than 50 % of all cases, and traffic accident and injury cases are less than the former. 3) The number of patients -especially in the case of children- tends to be increased in the hospitals which are accepting cases with every grades of seriousness, much considerably than the specialized hospitals providing only tertiary service. 4) Only few cases are found who have refered from other medical facilities before reaching the final ones. 5) In tertiary hospitals, about a half of admitted patients are accommodated in ICU from the beginning. 6) When the patients recover from critical conditions, most of them are to be transfered to another hospital or ward. But it takes certain time to find appropriate accommodation for continuous treatment.
