In 2006, we launched the program called Train Medical Trainers of Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) Institute.
The purpose of this program is to teach techniques if PCI, the mainstreams of treatment for modern heart and blood vessel disease, to the doctors of PCI developing countries. The PCI procedures have been already spread and taught by Japanese doctors in Asian Counties. However, many of these were temporary actions and its technical training elements to local doctors were not sufficient enough. On the other hand, Japan has been helping Asian countries with many cutting-edge medical devices. Those cutting-edge medical devices are useless possessions if local doctors cannot make use of them. This program aims at continuous training that focus on the development of local doctors by Japanese PCI doctors with world-class techniques. We invite cardiovascular internal medicine specialists in PCI developing countries to Japan offer them comprehensive PCI training, including lectures and training with actual practice. We also send Japanese doctors to the facility of the doctor who wished to take our training and provide technical training at their facility. Since we launched this program in 2006, we have invited 5 to 6 young cardiovascular internal medicine specialists from Asian countries every year and provided training at our hospital. While the training was offered in a short period of a week, the doctors who participated in the training learned much of the cutting-edge technique before returning home, and we are now considering to plan a similar program again this year.

We planned this program in the hope of making some kind of contribution so that in near future, medical services of the same level can be provided everywhere in the world. We sincerely hope that this program will allow as many doctors as possible to master the technique of percutaneous Cardiovascular intervention so that there will be more countries where people can receive the same PCI treatment as people in Japan.

Toshiya Muramatsu
Administrative Director
Train Medical Trainers of Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) Institute
Chief Director of Cardiovascular Intervention and Therapeutics center/ Deputy Director of Tokyo General Hospital