13/11/2025
Ohayou gozaimasu you lovely lot!
We’ve had the misfortune of having to visit a couple of health centres and a hospital during the first half of our Japan trip but you know what I’m like for a silver lining… ☁️⛅️
I’ve spent the time Google translating posters and picking up pointers for how the Japanese do things.
Long post alert‼️🚨
The photos of the hospital speak for themselves. Look how clean? You could eat your sushi off of that floor! Everyone wore masks. No exception. We had to buy one for 25p each 😷🤣
👟👠👞🥾👡At the GP practice, as in people’s homes & temples around Japan, shoes come off at the door. You can walk in socks or they have slippers for you to wear.
👨🏻⚕️Staff can’t do enough to help. The Internal Medicine Doctor personally met us at reception and took us to a consulting suite where he was assisted by a nurse & HCA 👩⚕️
While Google translate was doing all of the hard work, the consultation was two way traffic. The doctor listened to our concerns, ideas and experience and then worked out a way of reassuring us or testing to eliminate.
🚕👨🏻⚕️🩺💊🚕Our A&E journey from taxi drop off to collection was 1 hour. This included: consultation, CT scan, medication administration, scan results put on to CD.
Now, you may say “well this is an A&E that’s not under pressure”
This was the only open hospital in Kanazawa at this time. Apparently all medical facilities (apart from this one) close half day on Thursdays.
And yet there were only a handful of us in there. This is because the Japanese don’t abuse the system and this is partly because they pay a small amount of the treatment cost. ¥¥
The whole consultation, medication and on the spot abdominal CT was £100. TOTAL for us even as tourists.
We’d have gladly paid more as foreigners using their health system.
🩸💉Here you can have walk-in blood tests.
You pay around £5 for the blood draw, and additional per test. A kidney function test was £5. I noticed more specialist tests were around £10-15 at most.
💴This is because the government pay around 70% and the patient pays 30% PLUS an essential monthly insurance, like NI. This is reduced to 10% contribution for pensioners and those on low income.
While I’m fully aware that at home we pay our NI, I do wonder if we had to pay a small contribution for non life saving emergency treatments, if our waiting lists would be smaller and people would abuse it less. I’ve spent days in British GP receptions and A&Es over the years wondering if some of the ‘patients’ really needed to be there?
It would only work, however, if that money goes DIRECTLY back into the same system. Not only Training doctors, nurses and support staff, but creating a workplace they want to stay and invest in with their passion and skills.
As with all staff we’ve met here, from road sweepers to consultants, everyone takes immense pride in their work and wants to give their best.
I will say that what I’ve seen here gives me hope that our governments plan to provide more diagnosis and treatment facilities in the community to ease pressure on our hospitals will work, so let’s look after corringham & Fobbing Health Hubs and our GP practices.
