Obstetricians have disappeared in Japan. These days, if we kept an obstetricians we could keep running a hospital, especially in a local city. A hospital is flooded with expectant mothers.
A woman said that she was really happy to have a baby in her hometown. She delivered a baby last month in this hospital. It is located in Wakayama prefecture, where women have 400 babies per year. But there are only 2 obstetricians. In addintion, one of them has to make changes to another hospital to do research. So this hospital was decided that they closed childbirth section this October. If ther closed it, mothers would have to go far from this hospital which is located in another city. It takes over one hour to go there.
According to Japanese medical system, if we were lack of doctors, we could ask university hospitals to send substitute doctors. Normally, that could be enough to find them, but in this case, they could not find them. So they had to ask government to send them. Fortunately, they could find a doctor from Kyu-shu where is in the far distance from that hospital.
The problem is it goes without saying that we do not have enough doctors. Moreover they tend to gather big general hospitals in a big city. We have a big difference between a city and a local city. That is why many expectant mothers try to go to there, even though they have to drive over 2 hours. Big hospitals have to accept high-risk deliver. So since this April, 43 expectant mothers were delivered by helicopter in an emergency situation.
Local hospitals can not accept them because they do not have enough doctors and facilities. So it is not unusual that they are refused to accept in a local hospital.
An expectant mother had died about 6 months ago, after she was gone through over 10 hospitals. This incident was occured a lot of controversy in Japan. Some people said doctors seem to have been had enough knowledge, even though they are working in a local hospital.
Personally, government should encourage in increasing the number of doctors. They do not want to be an obstetrician, because of overworking and low income compare with another doctor. We have to take a strong stand for our government reformation of our medical system. If their working condition was getting better, we could get better treatment.
