A Study on Medical Support System in Multiple Hospitals for a Large Tsunami Disaster

Abstract

In 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami destroyed three prefectural hospitals of Iwate Prefecture in Japan. Iwate Prefecture has 25 public hospitals in the area of Iwate prefecture. The authors interviewed two medical doctors. One is a doctor in a seacoast-area hospital and another is a doctor of an inland-area hospital. The doctor in the inland-area hospital has been helped by the medical service in a coastal area hospital in the large disaster. And the authors also interviewed an officer who works in Iwate Medical Central Office. He accumulated the hospital information and contributed to arrange much support in the disaster. Based on the interviews and obtained several documents, this paper describes some issues and problems on the current medical support system in the emergency and long-term medical service. Then, a new idea of Medical Support System is proposed for applying a large-scale disaster. This concept obtained from the precious experience can be adopted in other areas to prevent from medical and healthcare damages in the future large tsunami disaster.