Message from the Chancellor and the President
SOBUE Kenji, Chancellor of Iwate Medical University Educational Corporation
The origins of Iwate Medical University go back to 1897 when founder Shunjiro Mita established Iwate Private Hospital and, simultaneously, Iwate Medical School at his own expense. At the time, medical education in Hokkaido and throughout the Tohoku region had long been at a standstill, and community healthcare had fallen into disarray. Noteworthy here is the fact that when Mita established the Iwate Medical School, he also founded the Iwate Midwives and Nurses Training School.During the Meiji Period (1867-1912), he foresaw the importance
of? “team treatment” or as he put it, “Medical treatment will not improve if physicians are the only ones that we train” and put it into practice. Today, we have become a comprehensive, treatment-focused university.? We strive to train medical specialists who make “preserving? community medical treatment” their priority, offering the only campus in Japan where the medical, dental, pharmaceutical, and nursing faculties? all share the same campus. In the fall of 2019, we also opened a new? 1,000-bed new Yahaba hospital, the largest in northern Tohoku and? Hokkaido, and established the Uchimaru Medical Center, which uses the facilities of the old Uchimaru hospital to provide high-standard outpatient care. The new hospital is? “especially caring to its patients” and provides advanced care with its full lineup of medical? instruments that are cutting edge on a global scale. Our hospital also encourages joint research with? various leading Japanese medical instrument manufacturers. For example, we have developed and? have become the first institution in the world to adopt a 320-detector row CT scanner, and is a global leading research hub in the area of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Learning from our? experiences in the COVID-19 pandemic, we have also built an Infection Disease Countermeasures Center with 6 beds for severe cases in a separate building of the new Yahaba hospital to manage COVID-19 and other new infectious diseases. Looking ahead, as a university that can provide community-focused healthcare while also producing globally visible research, we will continue our work of training the next generation of medical specialists. Our undying hope is that our graduates will develop the skills at this university with its diverse faculty and student body to become the motivating force for providing cutting-edge medical care to the general public.
OGASAWARA Kuniaki, President of Iwate Medical University
We then established the School of Pharmacy and the Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2007, transferred the basic courses of the School of Medicine and the School of Dentistry to Yahaba in 2011, and founded the School of Nursing, to restart in 2017 as a comprehensive medical university that offers the faculties of medicine, dentistry, pharmaceutics, and nursing. In this educational environment with no barriers between disciplines, we are able to cultivate the core elements of our team treatment approach among students from all four faculties, starting from their time here at this institution. Additionally, in the course of their studies, our graduates gain first-hand experience when it comes to the practice of community medicine, which has served as the foundation of our university ever since it was established.
Each faculty offers on-the-job experience, on-the-job training, and practical training, to go along with? an education based on collaboration among the four faculties related to team treatment. On September 21, 2019, at the Yahaba Campus, we opened the Iwate Medical University Hospital? (“Yahaba New Hospital”), which serves as a world-class 1,000-bed facility drawing on a combination of cutting-edge medical equipment and top-notch medical staff. Meanwhile, the former university hospital at Uchimaru in Morioka City has become the Uchimaru Medical Center, and serves primarily as an outpatient treatment hospital with 50 beds. We have developed an operating structure linking the two hospitals, thereby enabling them to handle medical care not only for Iwate Prefecture but also the northern Tohoku region in particular, and the entire region in general. We want to make
the most of the unique features of these two large medical institutions. For our students, they will serve as extraordinary campuses for on-the-job experience and on-site education. What?s more, for resident clinicians, resident physicians, and resident dentists, the two institutions will serve as exemplary centers for clinical training. In the natural splendors of Iwate, in harmony with nature, we are t raining highly competent medical professionals who understand the ills and pains of patients who are physically ill and have also undergone mental trauma, and who will have a gentleness of spirit that can bring them closer to their patients.