June 11th: Visit Jyuntendo University Hospital, PM Guest Speaker, Ms. Chikako Ishii

Today we visited Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital. It was quite interesting to see the differences between a hospital in the U.S. and a hospital in Japan. To begin with, the rehabilitation center only takes acute patients. This means they only have patients that will be there for about 2-3 weeks. U. S. hospitals have more individual rooms while the hospital here had rooms for more than one person. There was more collaborative care here as opposed to the U.S. They also use numbers for patients waiting instead of names to provide privacy. We were also very fortunate that a patient allowed us to observe while she had an ultrasound. After speaking with a guest speaker this evening, I learned school children in Japan are not forced to go to school if they do not want to. In the U.S. children are forced to go to school until the age of 16.

-Kristen

Today we visited Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital. After a short introduction, we went on an extremely lengthy tour of the hospital’s facilities. My initial impression of the hospital was that it was crowded and narrow. Wherever we went, our group had to squeeze into small spaces and avoid bumping into patients. However, we never got lost because our excellent hosts always made sure that we were together. We specifically toured the pediatric unit, the obstetrics and gynecology department, the rehabilitation center, the emergency room, and the graduate school.  I enjoyed learning about the hospital and actually observing the inner workings of several departments. I couldn’t believe that they let us see an ultrasound! After an amazing tour, we had lunch with the director of the hospital. The sushi was very good-the eel and tuna were my personal favorites. Then they gave us beautiful shirts and sent us on our way.

After a long break, the guest speaker, Ishii-san, arrived. She talked about mental health in Japan, family therapy, and different issues that Japanese people face. I especially found her discussions about hikikomori and parent-child abuse to be fascinating. I was very grateful for her coming to share her wisdom with us.

じゃあまた (See you later),

Amanda Rice

Hey everyone! Today was so cool. We visited Juntendo University Hospital/Medical School. As I’m a Healthcare Administration major, it was really cool to see the way a hospital is run in another country across the world. We did the tour first, which introduced us to all different wards of the hospital, including pediatrics, cancer care, ER, rehabilitation, and obstetrics. The hospital is different in that it is very compact; there is not a lot of open space like U.S. hospitals. Patients take a number from an electronic machine when they get to the hospital and are seen in that order and they are allowed to consult any department they want (including internal medicine). In the morning, the hospital takes walk in patients until the afternoon, when they exclusively accept appointment only. There weren’t really any large televisions in the hospital now that I think about it. Patients were mostly sitting quietly waiting to be seen. After the tour, we visited the small area of the hospital where the medical school was housed and then had a delicious fresh lunch of nigiri sushi and green tea. I really enjoyed the visit to the hospital because it was very useful for my major. I learned so much! Oh, then I went home and took a nap and spent the rest of the evening in bed until the guest speaker arrived at 7pm. She was a family therapist and taught us much about mental health care in Japan. We learned that there used to be a large stigma surrounding mental health issues but that has lessened very much now as depression has become more common. She noted that mental health issues are more commonly treated with prescription drugs than talk therapy, which I found interesting. I’m sure Kami will describe the guest speaker much better as she wrote the questions the guest speaker answered! 😀

-Paige

Today we visited the Juntendo University Hospital in Shin-Urasayu in the morning. We had a presentation about the hospital system – which has many different locations around the city, like IU’s – by the Head of Administration and then took a tour of the hospital. We saw the emergency department, cancer treatment center, department of pediatrics, OB/GYN department, and the graduate sciences division, which is located on the top floor of the hospital. By American standards,  there were a lot of people (both staff and patients) in a relatively small place, but everything was still clean and efficient. I was especially impressed by their emergency medicine system, which does a much better job of categorizing patients by severity and transferring them to the correct hospital or department. We had an interpreter who spoke English very well so it was easy to understand and I feel like I learned a lot.

In the afternoon we wandered around a few of the train stations to find Bryce a new duffel bag and Kristen an umbrella, and then stopped by the supermarket. We had a presentation by one of Bell sensei’s longtime friends in the evening – Iishi sensei, a family therapist who has worked both in the United States and in Japan. A few weeks ago I had been asked to come up with a list of mental health related questions for her, and although they were a bit outside of her specialty, she did a lot of research and brought many answers, and we had a great discussion about family dynamics afterward. I deeply appreciated the time she spent on my questions, and I’m glad that she’s coming with us to the birthing center tomorrow.

-Kami

Juntendo University, like IUPUI, has a number of teaching/research hospitals associated with the campus. Our group was able to tour one of the older ones, Urayasu Hospital. The tour was interesting in a number of ways: one of the most interesting things to me was that the “private” exam rooms were all open to a back hallway for the staff to travel between rooms -but it also meant that they were open to each other! I can’t imagine doing something like that in the US; we have too many concerns about patient privacy.

One incredibly innovative thing that they are doing at Urayasu has to do with their critical care ambulance: in the case of a patient whose condition may need the immediate attention of a doctor (for instance with a stroke or heart attack), rather than sending out just EMTs and medics, the ambulance goes out with a doctor and a nurse on board in addition to the normal crew. This way, they are able to have a doctor intervene earlier, and it is showing some success in creating better outcomes. They are also leading in Japan in creating collaborative, patient-centered treatment teams. I found both of these things fascinating.

Additionally, they are doing some amazing, innovative research as well, and have been able to publish several papers in recent years. All of these factors combined to make for a really impressive tour!

After the tour, we were able to enjoy a lunch of fresh sushi, which Chiba is justifiably famous for. We had the privelige of sharing our meal with the administrator of the hospital. I was thankful that he took time out of his busy day to eat with us!

…….

In the evening, we were joined by a special guest, who spoke to us about mental health in Japan. Some of the problems she described to us seem to be uniquely Japanese, but some others seem much the same -communication is a challenge everywhere! Kami prepared a number of questions for her, which contributed to our understanding of the differences between mental health care between the US and Japan.

-Ruth

Today we received a tour of Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital. It amazed me how similar yet different things were. There were a lot of people (similar to that of American Hospitals). However, patients received a number and waited till their number was called (this is different). For the Emergency Center of Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital, instead of triaging the patients the hospitals in a way were “triaged”. Center hospitals received the more severe cases from the ambulance (this is sort of true in America in how certain hospitals specialize in different things). Also, they have a rapid car system which allows a doctor to go on emergency calls along with an EMT instead of the EMT by themselves. A major difference that I noted was how the rooms were only separated by a curtain in some places. In American hospitals, all the different rooms are more private. Something I wondered about was how they contain certain diseases in the hospital since the rooms were not as private. However, I didn’t think about this until after we had already left and I allowed myself to freely “sort” the information I had soaked in during the tour. The technology at the hospital was terrific! The labs looked very similar to some of the labs on campus (I was part of the freshman work program for the biology department). All the staff at the hospital was very nice to us and I felt very welcomed.

After we left the hospital, we went back to the Friends Center and had a guest speaker. Her name was Chikako Ishii. She was very nice and knowledgeable about Japanese mental health. Some things surprised me, like how far back Japan is in regards to mental health care. But they are making strides in improving it.

Something I didn’t know about was hikikomori. We don’t really have that in the United States, and even if we do, we have laws that force students to go to school and not stay home until a certain point. When I was a child, I remember feeling a sense of guilt if I didn’t go to school. (I still do even today!)

I think both countries do have a stigma that does go with mental health. It’s hard to change stigmas but hopefully with enough understanding they can be overcome. This talk and reflection of mental health has once opened my eyes again to the stigma we may carry.

We all went to bed after the talk.

-Jena

 

By this day I was starting to feel better after getting sick and I was excited to visit Juntendo Hospital. I have limited experience in hospitals compared to many of my fellow travelers so this was certainly a new experience for me. I was surprised to see how busy the facility was compared to many of the hospitals I have been at at IUPUI. The waiting rooms were full of many types of people. Because healthcare can be much more affordable, many people visit the hospitals more often and for longer periods of time than people in the USA. I also found their pharmaceutical lab to be very interesting. I have a lot of experience working in laboratories so it was very interesting to see a clinical lab in action. I was very impressed with the knowledge of the pharmacist. I was also very impressed with the hospitality of the hospital workers even though I still wasn’t feeling well enough to eat the sushi.

Ms. Chikako Ishii was our evening speaker. I was impressed with how well prepared she was and how much knowledge she had regarding mental health and family therapy in Japan. Again, this is not my field so I was excited to learn a lot. The most interesting aspects of her talk were regarding some of the stigma around mental health in Japan as well as some of the unique mental health issues in Japan such as Hikikomori. Overall this was a great day and I was very glad to be feeling better!

-Ethan