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市立札幌病院
Show a driver 「市立札幌病院」. It stands beside JR Sōen Station, one stop west of Sapporo Station and three minutes’ walk from the platform.
- TypePublic — municipal hospital owned and run by the City of Sapporo
- BedsAbout 672
- AddressKita 11-jo Nishi 13-chome 1-1, Chuo-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-8604
- Switchboard+81 11 726 2211
- Ambulance and fire — nationwide, not the hospital119
- Websitecity.sapporo.jp/hospital
- HoursOutpatient reception 8.45am–11am and 1pm–3pm on weekdays; the site publishes no emergency-department hours
- LanguagesJapanese; the hospital publishes sign-language interpreting and an automatically translated website, but no foreign-language interpreter service
- On the mapOpen in Google Maps
The city’s own hospital, and the one an ambulance in the central and western wards most often heads for: 672 beds, 32 departments and a critical-care centre designated in 1993. It is also a disaster base hospital and the prefecture’s designated infectious-diseases hospital. Outpatients are seen on a referral basis in most departments, and it stands three minutes from JR Sōen, one stop west of Sapporo Station.
What it is known for
Carrying the city’s emergency and public-health load. Sapporo City General Hospital is run by the municipality rather than a university, and its list of designations reads like a description of the jobs nobody else can do: a critical-care centre since 1993, a disaster base hospital since 1997, a comprehensive perinatal centre, a psychiatric emergency facility, and the first-class infectious-diseases hospital for the region. It publishes a bed count of 672 — 626 general, 38 psychiatric and 8 for infectious diseases — across 32 clinical departments, and treats out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and severe trauma among its emergency caseload.
Who it suits
Anyone an ambulance brings in, and any visitor who needs a large general hospital in the western half of the centre. It suits a walk-in patient less well than its position suggests: 27 of its departments run on a referral basis in principle, the outpatient desk works weekday mornings and early afternoons only, and support for a foreign patient extends to a machine-translated website and sign-language interpreting, not a medical interpreter. If you are well enough to plan, ask a clinic to write a referral letter first.
Cost and insurance
Being municipal makes it no cheaper for a visitor: prices in Japan are set nationally, and a traveller pays the full amount rather than a resident’s share. Arriving without a referral letter adds 7,700 yen at a first visit, or 5,500 yen for dental, and 3,300 yen at a follow-up if the hospital has already referred you back to a clinic. The hospital states plainly that it does not levy the charge on patients brought in by ambulance or in comparable urgent circumstances. Settle at the cashier, keep the itemised receipt, and ask for an English medical certificate for your insurer.
Getting there
Three minutes on foot from JR Sōen Station, which is one stop west of Sapporo Station on the Hakodate main line and about two minutes’ ride — easily the simplest hospital in the city to reach with luggage or a limp. There is no subway station nearby, but several bus routes stop at the front entrance, including the number 51 from JR Sapporo Station and the Kuwazono–Maruyama route. A taxi from the Odori hotels takes about ten minutes outside the snow-slowed rush hours.
Details checked against the hospital’s own website, September 2026. Call before a non-urgent visit; in an emergency call 119 or the hospital’s own emergency line above. Travel information, not medical advice.
The other 2 hospitals in Sapporo
- Sapporo Medical University HospitalPublic, about 844 beds, Nishi-18-chome, Tozai subway line.
- Tonan HospitalPublic, about 300 beds, Kita 4-jo Nishi 7-chome, five minutes from Sapporo Station.