Japani

I did my clinical clerkship in Department of Anesthesiology of Yamaguchi University Hospital, Ube, Japan in April 2007. From a medical point of view, the practice routines of the department were quite similar to the Finnish ones. However, medical students were allowed to do a lot less practical work than in Finland, they were barely allowed to talk to patients! The same applied to me too, as I was only a student on an exchange. Department of Anesthesiology covered operating rooms (OR), Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and the Pain Clinic. As I spoke no Japanese, the Pain Clinic

I did my clinical clerkship in the University Hospital of Yamaguchi, located in the city of Ube in western Honshu. Ube is a small industrial/rural city with around 200 000 inhabitants. For the first two weeks I stayed in paediatrics/neonatology, then one week in the department of gastroenterology and finally one week in cardiology. When applying to the exchange program, I did not wish to be assigned to cardiology or gastroenterology, but apparently it was impossible to place me in the dept. of  neonatology for the entire month. When I did

Last November, I went to Japan for a 4 weeks professional exchange in Osaka City University Hospital. I attended the Gastroenterology and Hepatology clinic. I also got a short, three-day visit in Radiology department because I told the local exchange committee that I was interested in that department.

 

I took part in FiMSIC/IFMSA research exchange in July 2006 in Fukui, Japan. My project was called "Regulation of food intake", and it was in physiology department in Fukui Medical University and was led by professor Higuchi. Before going to Fukui I stayed one week in Tokyo with japanese friends of my friend, and they showed me tokyo around, so I knew something about japanese culture before arriving at Fukui. I was totally 7 weeks in Japan, and my flight were about 1150 euros. The price was okay, because i booked them quite late.

I worked in the Hokkaido University School of Medicine, department of anatomy/embryology. The facilities were quite old, but everything worked very well. Also the atmosphere in the laboratory was more relaxed than I had expected.