Cross-cultural communication （21）　

21）Airline company consulting physician
Since 2006, I have been the consulting physician for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, and since 2010 I have also been the same job for Air France. The job of a consulting physician for an airline company is to provide medical care to airline crew such as captains and cabin attendants when they are in Japan and become ill or injured, and to introduce them to appropriate medical facilities. I do not provide medical care for passengers.

The crew are chosen for their robust health and they also undergo regular health checks, so they rarely fall ill. However, if you work for two companies, you will on average be asked to see a patient once a month. This is just an average, and when it happens it keeps happening. There were even times when I was asked to see a patient three weeks in a row. On the other hand, there are also times when three months pass without a single request.

For both companies, the regular hotel in the city of Osaka is a 30-minute taxi ride from Kido Clinic. So, when I receive a request for treatment during the day, I ask the patient to come to the clinic from the hotel by taxi. Since airlines are important customers for the hotel, the hotel staff, who are used to handling things like contacting the clinic and arranging taxis, take care of everything. The problem is when I get a request for a late-night consultation. If I haven't had too much to drink, I'll send a taxi from the clinic to the hotel to make a house call. However, there are times when that's not possible, even once or twice a year. Once, I had to call an ambulance and have them find an emergency hospital, but at that time, all the hospitals refused to treat patients who didn't speak Japanese, so I had a bit of a problem. (See “Osaka, the International City, at Night”.)

Even if you visit a doctor at night or on a holiday, you won't be able to get any medicine if there is no pharmacy that accepts prescriptions. The pharmacist at the pharmacy next to Kido Clinic did some research and found out that there are quite a few pharmacies in the city that are open late at night and on holidays. It might be useful for you to know about this too.
So, I have reported that Kido Clinic is playing a part in the medical infrastructure of “International City Osaka”.

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