2019 Volume 20 Issue 1 Pages 41-44
There are many difficulties to establish emergency medical services in rural area. For keeping good motivation in the medical staff, we need some ideas for efficiency. In April 1, 2016, Minami-Nara General Medical Center was established in wider southern rural area of Nara prefecture where there was no emergency medical services. In preparation for some foreseeable problems in starting a new emergency department in a rural medical center, we created a new program much like ‘on-the-job-training’ where less-skilled doctors were buddied up with a versed doctor, and built a consulting system using ICT (information and communication technology). Every staff at our hospital can consult the other medical specialist who is out of hospital at any time. We accepted 22,369 patients including 6,929(31.0%) ambulances and 272(1.2%) doctor helicopters between April 1, 2016 and December 31, 2017. We were able to accept twice as many patients than we used to.
From our experience, we can say it is possible to manage emergent medical services in rural area by making enough preparations for risk hedge.
