TOKYO -- After getting struck by a motorcycle, an elderly Japanese man with head injuries waited in an ambulance as paramedics phoned 14 hospitals, each refusing to treat him.
He died 90 minutes later at the facility that finally relented - one of thousands of victims repeatedly turned away in recent years by understaffed and overcrowded hospitals in Japan.
Paramedics reached the accident scene within minutes after the man on a bicycle collided with a motorcycle in the western city of Itami. But 14 hospitals refused to admit the 69-year-old citing a lack of specialists, equipment and staff, according to Mitsuhisa Ikemoto, a fire department official.
The Jan. 20 incident was the latest in a string of recent cases in Japan in which patients were denied treatment, underscoring health care woes in a rapidly aging society that faces an acute shortage of doctors and a growing number of elderly patients.
One of the hospitals agreed to provide care when the paramedics called a second time more than an hour after the accident. But the man, who suffered head and back injuries, died soon afterward of shock from loss of blood.
The injured man might have survived if a hospital accepted him more quickly, Ikemoto said. "I wish hospitals are more willing to take patients, but they have their own reasons, too," he said.
The motorcyclist, also hurt in the accident, was denied admission by two hospitals before a third accepted him, Ikemoto said. He was recovering from his injuries.
