Ryohei Nishimura

Japanese Society of Veterinary Emergency and Intensive Care

On the occasion of the international symposium

As the end of 2011 drew near, Dr. Kazuo Okada, former professor of the Department of Anesthesiology at Teikyo University School of Medicine, suddenly visited my laboratory. I'm ashamed to say that at the time, I only had a vague idea that I had heard his name before, and I didn't know that he was a very famous doctor both in Japan and abroad. When I first met him, Dr. Okada was already close to 80 years old, but I could tell in an instant that he was a very quick-witted person. Dr. Okada's first words were that he was currently creating guidelines for veterinary cardiopulmonary resuscitation (I remember that we often called it cardiopulmonary cerebral resuscitation at the time) in the United States. He told me to participate in this and to work to spread these guidelines to Japan and other Asian countries. Until then, I had some knowledge of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but it was mostly based on information from human medicine, and no one was sure how to perform it properly in dogs and cats, so I thought this information was very useful. In fact, Dr. Okada not only established the Japan Resuscitation Council (JRC), but also established the Asian Resuscitation Council in order to join the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR), which is the umbrella organization for cardiopulmonary resuscitation organizations in each country (the rules changed and single-country membership was no longer permitted), and even participated in creating the Cost of Resuscitation for humans, which ILCOR continues to update. He is a leading international expert in human cardiopulmonary resuscitation. I may talk about why Dr. Okada, a human doctor, has such a high interest in animal cardiopulmonary resuscitation and is so enthusiastic about supporting it on another occasion, but in any case, this triggered a contact from Dr. Manuel Boller (now in Canada) and Dr. Hiroki Sano (now in Hong Kong), co-founders of the RECOVER initiative, who were at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States at the time, and RECOVER in Japan began.

After that, in June 2012, the RECOVER guidelines were published in a journal, and we were able to immediately take it up as a topic in a panel discussion at the Japanese Society of Veterinary Anesthesia and Surgery held that same month. Furthermore, Dr. Daniel Fletcher and Dr. Boller of Cornell University, who are the other founders of the RECOVER initiative, will be attending the European Resuscitation Council conference and the ILCOR conference to be held in Vienna, Austria in October, and in conjunction with this, a CPR training session using RECOVER will be held at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, so I was invited to participate, and so I decided to go to Vienna. The training course I saw there was very well-done, and I was able to see for myself how clinically useful RECOVER is. Dr. Fletcher and Dr. Boller, whom I met for the first time in Vienna, were incredibly friendly and kind people, and promised to visit Japan the following year. After that, the RECOVER conference was held in San Francisco in April 2013, and in June, Professor Fletcher and Professor Boller came to Japan to give lectures and practical training. In September, at the IVECCS RECOVER conference held in San Diego, I was able to meet Mr. Kenichiro Yagi, who has been providing various support for RECOVER in Japan. We also received official permission to translate the RECOVER guidelines into Japanese, and we all worked together to translate them. Although only a part of the content is available on the RECOVER website. Unfortunately, Professor Okada passed away in 2022, but I believe he is continuing to encourage our activities in heaven.

What I felt most from this series of experiences was that in medicine, it is important not only to accumulate evidence but also to scientifically analyze it and make it useful in clinical practice. It was a very good experience to see part of the process of creating these as a consensus. This trend has been passed down to the Japanese Veterinary Emergency and Intensive Care Society (JaVECCS), which was founded in 2018, and continues to hold enthusiastic training courses. About 12 years have passed since I first met Dr. Okada, and during this time emergency and intensive care in Japan has rapidly developed and become one of the major fields. There is no doubt that JaVECCS has played a major role in this. Previously, a small number of doctors working in the emergency field had struggled to continue their academic activities, but in the emergency field, the number of young veterinarians who are interested and enthusiastic about intensive care has increased dramatically. I think that by gathering young veterinarians who are interested and enthusiastic about intensive care, we were able to raise the trend at once. In a sense, it may have been inevitable that we would host the 9th International Conference of the Japanese Veterinary Emergency and Intensive Care Society (VECCS) as a platinum sponsor. However, this is only the first stop. We hope that this international conference will lead to further development and enrichment of the field of veterinary emergency and intensive care in Japan, and that we will be able to disseminate information from Japan to the world. We look forward to seeing you all in Ariake.