The education ministry has given the go-ahead for Tohoku Pharmaceutical University in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, to open a medical school. Under the government's policy of controlling the number of practicing physicians, it will be the first medical school to open at a university in the country since 1979.
While the move is billed as a response to the severe shortage of doctors in Tohoku in the wake of the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, care needs to be taken so that opening the new school does not drain the already stretched staffing at hospitals in many parts of the region.
Past efforts to control of the number of doctors have resulted in a severe shortage, with the number of doctors per 1,000 people at 2.4 or about two-thirds of the average in industrialized countries. A bigger problem is the regional disparity in the availability of doctors, with the number in all prefectures of the Tohoku region below the national average. The education ministry has so far responded by increasing the enrollment quota at existing university medical schools, but since the early 1980s it has maintained a policy of not authorizing the creation of new schools.