Annual Report 2017
Surgical Center
Hiroyuki Fujimoto
Introduction
The Surgical Center deals with all kinds of malignant neoplasms. Our mission is to provide safe surgical care for patients (Safe Surgery Saves Lives). Several groups collaborate to ensure the best surgical care, consisting of anesthesiologists, surgeons from 18 surgical oncology departments, nurses, and medical-technical staff with support staff from radiology, clinical laboratory and pharmacy.
Routine activities
1) During the period from January 2017 to March 2018, the Surgical Center supported 6,881 surgical cases and 6,168 general anesthesia surgical cases (Tables 1, 2). Sentinel node navigation surgery in breast cancer, autonomic nerve preservation proximal gastrectomy with jejunal interposition in early gastric cancer, hepatectomy and pancreatectomy in patients with hepato-biliary and pancreas diseases, endoscopic resection under general anesthesia in gastrointestinal (GI) cancer are unique treatments in our institution, and are occasionally performed in the Surgical Center.
2) The da Vinci Robotic Surgical System has been introduced to provide less invasive surgery for patients with prostate cancer and rectal cancer.
3) The post-anesthesia care unit has been a part of the Surgical Center since 2015.
4) The multidisciplinary meeting started in 2014. The multidisciplinary team includes medical doctors, nurses, and medical engineers (MEs), and they meet to plan the best surgical pathway during operation.
5) The Surgical Center staff works as part of a multidisciplinary team actively in planning the best utilization of operating rooms. Scheduling, equipment usage, and staffing in 16 operating suites were evaluated to establish an optimal work flow, streamline room turnover, and improve start times.
6) A medical device nurse, who is engaged in equipment usage, has been assigned.
Education
All surgical oncology departments have their own training programs for their fellows with the support of the Surgical Center staff. Our surgical center also provides virtual reality simulators to allow fellows to develop the skills used in laparoscopic and thoracoscopic surgery. About 80 foreign doctors visited our surgical center.
Table1. Number of general anesthesia cases (January 2017 - March 2018)
Table 2. Total number of operations (January 2017 - March 2018)
