Aiming to become “all-rounders who can support people’s health”

The role of the Department of General Medicine and Primary Care varies depending on the institution, but I believe that it is the department responsible for supporting the health of nearby local residents with “flexibility” and various approaches in accordance with the needs of patients and their families, taking into account the “breadth” that can cover various categories, including organs, sex, age, acute/chronic status, psychosocial problems, disease prevention, health/medical care/welfare, environmental medical care (clinics/hospitals), and regional characteristics. In other words, the doctors we want to cultivate are “all-rounders who can support people’s health,” and we are devoting ourselves to achieving this goal every day.

What we especially focus on is education. Currently, training programs to cultivate general practitioners have yet to be well-developed in Japan, but we are taking full advantage of our merits as an educational research institution and a university hospital with a rich network of nearby medical institutions, and we are putting work into cultivating general practitioners with clinical skills and a developed sense of mission who will be active on the front lines in the community. We are achieving this through a systematic training program and a carefully crafted system of coordination. Our work has received attention across Japan as a model case of a training system in which a university and a community work together, and we have made many achievements, such as producing more than twenty family doctors so far.

Recently, the collapse of the regional medical care system has received attention as a big social problem, but the expertise of the Department of General Medicine and Primary Care should be greatly demonstrated in local medical practice, and the department has raised expectations as a model of restoration for the regional medical care system. We would like to develop positive activities, not only in education/medical care but also in research areas, and to contribute to an enriched and healthy life for people of the community.

Tetsuhiro Maeno
Professor, Primary Care and Medical Education, University of Tsukuba
Head of General Medicine and Primary Care, University of Tsukuba Hospital