Japanese Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) has important duties to support and reinforce functionally insufficient key disaster hospitals in the large-scale disasters. However, it is difficult for Japanese DMAT to fulfill these duties in the current circumstances, because the DMAT consists of individual institutions and Teams have less experience to work in the other institutions. To resolve the issues, disaster drills for some DMATs which consist of several institutions have been held since 2008. We evaluated the effectiveness of the drills and educational system.

Investigation was performed by surveillance questionnaires to 129 participants in the drill (staffs from DMATs, Red Cross and local government, and sham patients). The questionnaires are: A. Was the cooperative medical practice performed smoothly? B. Was the support for hospitals conducted effectively?, C. Was the medical record for wide-area transportation completed? (for our staffs only), D. Was our activity enough? (for participants excluding us), and E. Was the drill beneficial?

85 participants including 30 staffs in our institution answered the questionnaires (65.9%). The number of participants who answered ‘Yes’ was as follows: A. 48 (56.5%), B. 64 (75.3%), C. 8 (26.7%), D. 44 (83.0%) and E. 81 (95.3%).

Although the cooperative medical practice was not so smooth, it was recognized that members in DMATs got mutual trust by their high knowledge and skills. And it was suggested that DMAT could not command and control the hospital staffs without their understanding the equipments and documentations used by DMAT. And it is ideal to change the mindset of hospital top managements towards the disaster medicine through the repeated drills.

The repeated disaster drills at the local area is essential to make DMAT function sufficiently.