Shogo Kaku

Neurosurgery East Yokohama hospital

Vice Director

Aiming to Eradicate Strokes

Higashi Yokohama Neurosurgery Hospital is a community-based healthcare facility, which specializes in providing emergency medical care for patients who have suffered strokes, with the ultimate aim of eradicating strokes completely. In Japan, strokes are currently ranked as the fourth most-common cause of death, with around 330,000 people dying of stroke every year. As demonstrated by Japan’s National Diet passing a bill for a basic act on measures to combat strokes and circulatory diseases, avoiding strokes can be considered an important national issue. In light of this, Higashi Yokohama Neurosurgery Hospital aims to become a model case for Japanese hospitals working to eradicate strokes. By drawing attention to Yokohama as an example of a city that has been successful in eradicating strokes, we hope that our efforts will spread throughout the whole of Japan.

Year of Birth: 1974

Birthplace: Tokyo

Name: Neurosurgery East Yokohama hospital

Headquarters: Yokohama, Kanagawa

Founded: 1986

Type of business: Medical foundation

url: http://noukyukai.or.jp/

The reason why I decided to try to become a doctor was that my father was also a doctor. From a young age, my father would take me to his place of work, and from watching him engage with the patients I, too, began to aspire to that profession. As doctors, we provide the service of medical care, and are rewarded with thankyous from grateful patients, who are the “users” of this service. I felt that this was a kind of job satisfaction that could not be attained in other professions. I also saw my father being called in at all hours of the day—even at night—to handle emergencies, and I respected that he was so needed, and felt that I wanted to be like that, too. I started out working as a trainee doctor at a university-affiliated hospital, but decided that I really needed to concentrate on honing my skills, and so I chose the path of studying away from home (although still in Japan). I spent a total of 13 years polishing my skills at a hospital that saw many cases of vascular disorders and brain tumors, before eventually returning to Higashi Yokohama Neurosurgery Hospital, which was run by my father. He had built this hospital up over the course of several decades, and it did not have any major problems or issues to be tackled in particular. It was, however, at a point in time when some form of transformation was required in order to advance to the next stage. It was at this time that I was called up with the role of blowing a breath of fresh air into the hospital, when there was a need to renew and update the hospital’s efforts—in a positive sense—in order to take a new step forward in line with the needs of the times.

For the first year, I focused on observing and researching what was wrong at the hospital, and what was needed. The conclusion that I arrived at was that what was required was not drastic innovation, but rather a transformation in line with the principle of learning new things by revisiting the knowledge of the past. In other words, we would overcome the “stagnation” (i.e. conservative thinking) that had developed over many years of continuous operation by gradually adding new, clean water (i.e. partial transformations) without completely stopping the flow, until the water ran clear again. Amidst these efforts to surely and steadily implement small transformations, one thing that we introduced—which I considered as the first step—was a catheter-based treatment called endovascular therapy. Endovascular therapy is a minimally-invasive, cutting-edge technique that enables treatment to be applied without cutting directly into a patient’s head, simply by threading a fine catheter tube up through the groin to the site requiring treatment. I knew that this form of therapy would be essential in treating strokes in the future. Before returning to our hospital, I had already recognized that this therapy would continue to progress, and was confident that it would become a necessary skill for our hospital in the future, and so I had already spent four years acquiring this skill prior to my return. But suddenly incorporating a new method of treatment has a tendency to be viewed as denying or renouncing therapies that have been used up until that time. To prevent maladjustments from taking shape at our hospital, I was careful to ensure and maintain balance while incorporating it, which I did with the strong conviction that it was an absolutely essential treatment if we were going to aim to eradicate strokes. Stroke is a frightening disease because it has the potential to suddenly and rapidly lower the curtain on a person’s life, after a specific instant in time. In our profession, we aim to do whatever we can to stop the lowering of that curtain, and to enable the person to continue to live as much of a fruitful life as possible after the event. Because of the characteristics of the disease, it is very much a race against time, and it is for that reason we insist on the community-based approach. It is our goal, and our mission, to save the lives of patients in the local community with quick response and high-level skills.

Having an open organizational approach was essential for introducing new initiatives at the hospital one by one. I took time to converse with each member of staff individually, and endeavored to listen thoroughly to what they considered to be the hospital’s good and bad points. We also began working to make the hospital’s interior décor look cleaner and more beautiful, aiming to convey to patients and the outside world that our hospital was taking up the challenge of attempting new approaches. Another objective of this was to make our hospital a more comfortable place for our staff to work, and we feel that creating an environment where staff can work more actively and energetically has also lead to an increase in applications to our advertisements for job openings. As our human resources have increased, and our hospital has become a more energetic working environment, we have also begun to hold monthly meetings which we refer to as “motivation conferences.” At these participation-based meetings, we actively exchange opinions with regard to what should be done in order to further improve our hospital. If no opinions are shared, then that would mean our hospital is perfect, with a full score of 100. As far as I myself am concerned, I think that it currently warrants a score of around 60, and so I am leading these meetings in the direction of having everyone contribute their opinions as to what we should do in order to achieve the remaining 40 points. The reason for this is that I believe that having each and every member of staff think from a business manager’s perspective, consider things creatively and produce strategies is key to enabling the organization to grow. As an institution that provides community-based healthcare services, our hospital is analogous to a small-scale factory workshop operated by local craftspeople. By becoming such a “factory,” of the kind currently drawing the attention of major corporations, we will eventually be imitated by neighboring “factories,” and gradually our efforts will spread across the whole of Japan. With the aim of becoming an institution that can contribute to eradicating strokes from the whole of Japan, I feel that as a leader I must not stop pushing forward, in order to enable each and every one of our staff to become excellent craftspeople. Efforts to prevent diseases of the brain are extremely difficult, and this is also an issue for us. Currently, we are working in partnership with the city of Yokohama, and have launched a project to engage in regular actions, such as lectures targeting the local community. First of all, in order to save the people living in this city from the threat of stroke, I would like us to keep pushing forward one step at a time as we continue to tackle challenges while listening to the opinions of as many people as possible.

*Information accurate as of time of publication.

Neurosurgery East Yokohama hospital

Vice Director