Have the tsunami and nuclear accident following the Great East Japan Earthquake affected the local distribution of hospital physicians?

PLoS ONE 12 巻 5 号 e0178020- 頁 2017-05-25 発行
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Have the tsunami and nuclear accident following the Great East Japan Earthquake affected the local distribution of hospital physicians?
作成者
Inoue Kazuo
Matsumoto Masatoshi
収録物名
PLoS ONE
12
5
開始ページ e0178020
抄録
Objective: The Great East Japan Earthquake occurred on 11 March 2011 near the northeast coast of the main island, ‘Honshu’, of Japan. It wreaked enormous damage in two main ways: a giant tsunami and an accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP). This disaster may have affected the distribution of physicians in the region. Here, we evaluate the effect of the disaster on the distribution of hospital physicians in the three most severely affected prefectures (Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima).
Methods: We obtained individual information about physicians from the Physician Census in 2010 (pre-disaster) and 2012 (post-disaster). We examined geographical distributions of physicians in two ways: (1) municipality-based analysis for demographic evaluation; and (2) hospital-based analysis for geographic evaluation. In each analysis, we calculated the rate of change in physician distributions between pre- and post-disaster years at various distances from the tsunami-affected coast, and from the restricted area due to the FDNPP accident.
Results: The change in all, hospital, and clinic physicians were 0.2%, 0.7%, and −0.7%, respectively. In the municipality-based analysis, after taking account of the decreased population, physician numbers only decreased within the restricted area. In the hospital-based analysis, hospital physician numbers did not decrease at any distance from the tsunami-affected coast. In contrast, there was a 3.3% and 2.3% decrease in hospital physicians 0–25 km and 25–50 km from the restricted area surrounding the FDNPP, respectively. Additionally, decreases were larger and increases were smaller in areas close to the FDNPP than in areas further away.
Conclusions: Our results suggest that the tsunami did not affect the distribution of physicians in the affected regions. However, the FDNPP accident changed physician distribution in areas close to the power plant.
内容記述
This research was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grant Number JP25516015 (http://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-grants/index.html). The founder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
言語
英語
資源タイプ 学術雑誌論文
出版者
Public Library of Science
発行日 2017-05-25
権利情報
© 2017 Kashima et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
出版タイプ Version of Record(出版社版。早期公開を含む)
アクセス権 オープンアクセス
収録物識別子
[ISSN] 1932-6203
[DOI] 10.1371/journal.pone.0178020
[PMID] 28542461
[DOI] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178020