Building Regional Dialysis Support System in Preparation for Massive Quake Disaster / 日本農村医学会雑誌

ABSTRACT

  A ground rule of dialysis support in the event of massive earthquake disaster is to perceive the necessity of evacuating patients quickly and to have a system fully equipped to collect information as to the situation of the designated disaster hospital in a region and other facilities and the capacity to take care of patients. Furthermore, building a network incorporating dialysis facilities in the neighboring areas is essential. Through this network, efforts have to be made to work out a practical dialysis support program without delay (annular support system). It is also important to create a support scheme which does not impose an excessively heavy burden on the staffs of damaged facilities. To put it concretely, the following measures should be taken(1) to reduce the time needed for the transfer of patients to the mimimum;(2) to make the length of the patient's stay at a support facility the shortest possible;and (3) to get the data of dialysis patients ready and share the records with other dialysis facilities. To make the cooperative framework for tiding over a major earthquake disaster, it is important to establish the annular support system of dialysis facilities between the quake stricken area and its neighboring area. If a similar annular support system is not installed in many areas, cooperation does not function well. We must consider the ways and means to establish an ideal cooperative regional disaster prevention system in preparation of a large-scale earthquake, which may occur any time, while drawing a lesson from the previous earthquake disasters.