The Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at Yokosuka General Hospital Uwamachi (of which I’m the director) treats heart and vascular diseases in the city of Yokosuka and the surrounding municipalities, areas with a combined population of approximately 600,000. It’s the only facility in the region that can perform emergency surgeries and accept emergency patients every week, and for this reason it saves numerous lives.
Of the five staff members, three are board-certified specialists, and I’m a board-certified supervisor. The department is also a training facility for specialists, and I’m currently instructing two trainee surgeons.
The Yokosuka and Miura areas are home to a lot of elderly people, so the average age of patients is quite high and there are numerous high-risk surgical cases. To improve surgical outcomes we perform minimally invasive surgery using a thoracic endoscope. A small-incision approach is taken in half of our heart surgeries, and this results in fewer complications and shorter hospital stays.
We perform the largest number of minimally invasive cardiac surgeries in Kanagawa Prefecture. We do an especially large number of minimally invasive coronary bypass surgeries (which are performed at only a few facilities in Japan), and we get referrals from distant hospitals.
Recently endoscopic surgeries have been on the rise, and the same is true of less invasive endovascular procedures such as stent grafting.
