2011/03/22
A doctor checks an infant at Iwaki Kyoritsu Hospital in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, on Friday. (Shingo Kuzutani)
IWAKI, Fukushima Prefecture--Medical facilities in this quake-hit city are being stretched to the limit by an influx of evacuees from the evacuation zone around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
With hundreds of doctors and nurses having left their posts, those who remain are struggling to maintain services.
The evacuees, instructed by the authorities to leave a 20-km area around the stricken plant, have joined people fleeing from tsunami-devastated areas in Iwaki city, putting the city's medical system under severe strain.
At the publicly-run Iwaki Kyoritsu Hospital, 45 km south of the nuclear plant, lobbies and hallways have been filled with lines of patients every day since the March 11 disaster.
"We have a lot more patients now than we did right after the earthquake," said hospital chief Nobuo Hiwatashi.
About one-third of the hospital's 108 doctors and 730 nurses are absent. Many of them are believed to have left the city to avoid possible exposure to radiation.
"Overworking of remaining workers is posing a serious problem now," one nurse said.
The hospital, which is central to the city's medical infrastructure, has cracks in its walls but appears to have escaped major damage in the quake.
In the immediate aftermath of the shocks and tsunami, the hospital was filled with injured people. Staff said it resembled a field hospital in a war zone.
But the developing crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant has aggravated the situation. The closure of smaller hospitals and clinics in the area has put even more stress on the hospital, Hiwatashi said.
In Iwaki's Onahama and Taira coastal districts, which were wiped out by the tsunami, doctors and medical staff have been touring evacuation centers. Medicines are in short supply, and the stress on patients is becoming a problem, a 51-year-old doctor said.
Hiwatashi said the hospital was short of medicine, food and fuel. Supplies were delayed, possibly because of rumors that the area was contaminated with radioactive materials from Fukushima No. 1 plant.
Some doctors argued that the entire hospital should be moved, with all of its patients, but Hiwatashi vetoed the idea, pointing out that many patients could not be relocated.
However, he admits that his is unsure of his decision. "We need the government to say what the worst-case scenario is, so that we can take steps to deal with it," Hiwatashi said.
On Wednesday, three doctors in a hospital in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, left by train with 15 cancer patients, bound for a hospital in Tokyo.
"We decided that it would endanger the patients' lives if we kept them in a situation where even IV drips and blood-infusion equipment is deficient," one doctor said.
The Koriyama hospital still has 420 patients. Doctors said they were seeking hospitals outside the city to accept seriously ill patients.
(This article was written by Yoshihiro Tomita and Atsuko Kawaguchi.)
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