Hospitals in time of crisis - and the human consequences

February 27, 2012

Patients fell victim as Fukushima hospitals were isolated in wake of nuclear disaster

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20120227p2a00m0na010000c.html

On March 15, 2011, four days after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami hit, the government ordered residents within 20 to 30 kilometers of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant to stay indoors following hydrogen explosions at the plant a day earlier.

Futaba Hospital in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, which was already under orders to evacuate, had trouble finding another medical institution to transport patients. As a result, patients started dying one after the other, making the situation at the Prime Minister's Office tense.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano and others said that patients within 30 kilometers of the crippled nuclear power plant were safe so long as they stayed indoors. They ordered officials concerned to secure hospitals to accommodate fleeing patients in case of another explosion.

But Takeshi Karasawa, councilor at the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, predicted that hospitals within the 30-kilometer zone would become inoperative sooner or later. If orders to stay indoors continued, he surmised, people and supplies would not reach the hospital. The facility would lose doctors and employees and become inoperative, and somebody would have to transport abandoned patients.

But there had been no precedent for moving all hospital patients and long-term care recipients out of any particular prefecture. "We did not know who should do what and how to transport them," Karasawa recalled.

On March 15 Karasawa picked three young medical officials from among the ministry's staff and ordered them to go to Fukushima. One of them was Haruhiko Hakuno of the ministry's Health Science Division. "Please go to Fukushima now," Karasawa told Hakuno, who asked, "What's for?" Karasawa said, "Just go."

Hakuno did not know details of his mission until his arrival in Fukushima Prefecture on March 16. At 9:30 a.m. that day, he learned for the first time that his immediate job was to produce a list of medical institutions and the number of patients within 20 and 30 kilometers of the stricken nuclear plant.

Confusion was gripping Fukushima Prefecture's disaster measure headquarters on March 16. Hakuno's cell phone ran out of battery due to numerous phone calls from the ministry, the Prime Minister's Office and other parties.

There were six medical institutions within 20 to 30 kilometers of the nuclear plant, along with welfare facilities. Hakuno telephoned the hospitals to ask about them and their patients. The supply shortage was serious. "Patients will starve to death," a hospital official pleaded. Some patients were too frail to be relocated.

It was well after noon on March 17 that the prefectural disaster measure headquarters, the prefectural police, Self-Defense Forces and fire departments assembled for a joint meeting for the first time. One prefecture told them, "We are not going to allow patients to cross the prefectural border unless they are cleared of nuclear radiation."

Meanwhile, two seriously ill patients at a hospital in Minamisoma died due to a lack of medicine.

On March 18, a campaign began to transport all patients within the 30-kilometer zone. But Tetsuya Yajima, deputy vice health minister for technical policy coordination who was assigned to the crisis management center at the Prime Minister's Office, told the Mainichi, "The order to evacuate patients did not come from the Prime Minister's Office." He expressed regret that the Prime Minister's Office and the Fukushima prefectural disaster policy headquarters operated independently without policy coordination.

Click here for the original Japanese story