[Objective]　Healthcare resources are regionally misdistributed in Japan. This study aimed to examine the employment patterns of healthcare professionals in secondary medical care regions categorized by regional economic circulation structures.

[Methods]　We analyzed 335 secondary medical care regions in Japan. Since Kawasaki City has two secondary medical care regions, we merged two regions into one. Based on the Regional Economic Circulation Analysis Tool provided by the Ministry of the Environment, we divided the 334 regions into two groups: (1) 167 regions that were highly dependent on national funds and employment for healthcare services, using the definition of a previous study; and (2) 167 non-dependent regions. We then compared the employment patterns of healthcare professionals between healthcare-dependent regions and non-dependent regions.

[Results]　No significant differences were observed between the two groups in terms of the number per capita of hospital physicians, and nurses in clinics and long-term care facilities. In the healthcare-dependent region group, the number of hospital nurses and visiting long-term caregivers was higher than that in the non-dependent region group, whereas the number of clinic physicians, home-visiting nurses, and pharmacists was lower than that in the non-dependent region group.

[Conclusion]　These results suggest that healthcare professionals are unevenly distributed in hospitals in healthcare-dependent regions.

Questionnaire and interview surveys were conducted with hospitals to clarify the status of the accumulation of knowledge and know-how related to a hospital’s construction. The results revealed that 80% of hospitals that engaged in hospital construction did not have any explicitly documented references on information about the hospital’s construction, thereby indicating a lack of knowledge accumulation. Moreover, after about a decade of a hospital’s construction, approximately 30% of hospitals no longer had staff members who had been in charge at the time of the hospital’s construction, thus making it difficult to retain human resources with accumulated knowledge. Therefore, to ensure that useful information is recorded during a hospital’s construction, knowledge and know-how should be documented externally. The results of the interview survey revealed that common methods for collecting information externally included visiting other hospitals, architecture personnel and hospital-building researchers forming hospital-building project teams, and requesting construction contractors to share information. Notably, visits to other hospitals were the most frequently cited means of gathering information from external sources.