University Hospital

Medical Care Considerate of Humans and the Earth, Offering Holistic Medical Care Under the Newest Facilities and Technology

With the establishment of the Kyushu Medical School in 1928, the former Kurume Municipal Hospital came to be utilized as an educational facility. In 1932, a new hospital complex whose gross area was 14,000 square meters was built at its present address, the Asahi-machi campus. Since then, the hospital complex has been repeatedly expanded, and at present comprises about 1,100 beds with 102,000 square meters of floor space. The comprehensive medical care complex was built in order to practice patient-centered medical care. In 1981, the Emergency and Critical Care Center was established as an annex to the hospital as the tertiary medical center in the southern part of Fukuoka Prefecture. The Center was recognized as the only Advanced Unit of Emergency and Critical Care Center in the Kyushu district, which has two higher standard "doctor cars" and a heliport. Thus, the  tertiary system of emergency and critical care has improved immensely. With recent advances in medicine, the outpatient clinics were reorganized in 1992 as comprehensive outpatient clinics which include three medical centers - the Cardiovascular Disease Center, the Respiratory Disease Center and the Digestive Disease Center - and outpatient clinics of General Internal Medicine and General Surgery. This led to the establishment of our patient-centered medical care system. Since the hospital was approved as a special functioning hospital in 1993, the usual ratio of referral patients is more than 70% and is recognized as a referral hospital, boasting the mutual cooperation between hospitals and between the hospital and clinics. In 1998, in addition to the completion of the construction of the General Medical Building, a Multi-disciplinary Treatment Center, Palliative Care Center and the Maternal and Perinatal Medical Center were established. More beds were equipped in both the Advanced Unit of Emergency and Critical Care Center and the Kidney Disease Center. Moreover, an organ-based medical care system was introduced in the surgical wards. Since February of 2002, the hospital has put in place a doctor helicopter system, and has been practicing holistic advanced medical care with the most advanced facilities and functions appropriate for medical care in the 21st century as a mainstay hospital in regional medical care.

Kurume University PET Center

On January 15th of 2004, Kurume University started using PET (Positron-Emission Tomography) equipment, regarded as a technological innovation in medical care, in the early part of the 21st century. The PET scanner is a model by ADAC-Philips Co, which has the highest sensitivity detector (the ratio of detection of cancer is high). The Center produces a positron nuclide (fluorine-18, carbon-14, oxygen-15, nitrogen-13) and radioactive ligands used for PET imaging. Radioactive ligands are administered to patients, and PET images are obtained. The most advantageous point of this examination is that a full-length, three-dimensional image can be obtained by a single injection. Kurume University Hospital is the second hospital among private universities in Japan to have introduced PET, and has been continuing to provide advanced medical care as an advanced treatment hospital. PET has proven indispensable to the medical examination of cancer, and Kurume University Hospital is making developments for the eradication of cancer, playing an important role as the main regional hospital for the medical management of cancer. PET is a functional diagnostic method for observing molecular function, unlike image-based diagnostic methods. It is expected that PET will aid greatly in the discrimination of benign and malignant diseases, the diagnosis of the degree of malignancy, the diagnosis of the patient's disease stage, the search for primary lesions, and the evaluation of medical treatment (chemotherapy, effects of radiation judgment, diagnosis of recurrence, and post-operative survival rates). It is expected to contribute to the improvement of the examination and medical treatment of cancer with increasing speed. Moreover, it is anticipated that radioactive ligands affecting the mechanism of information transmission in cancer cells will be produced in the near future.