On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 7:56 AM Philip Barnes <p...@trigpoint.me.uk> wrote: > A clinic is where outpatients go, usually referred by their doctor to > see a specialist. > > The on the ground reality is that most clinics take place within > hospitals.
My primary care physician works out of a clinic. My family and I have had a number of specialist referrals from him over the years, many to the same clinic. It's got radiology (X-ray, ultrasound, CT, MR) on site, a clinical lab, and a variety of specialty departments: paediatrics, podiatry, dermatology, endocrinology, haematology, orthopaedics, oncology, gastroenterology (they can do EGD or colonoscopy on site), and so on. It's not a hospital and cannot admit patients overnight. (It does have a limited 24-hour operation; there's an 'urgent care' department.) I recently had a scan done at a local hospital, but that was simply that the radiology department there could schedule it at a more convenient time. Apart from one emergency visit, it was the first time I'd been to a hospital in over twenty years. Everything that could be done on an outpatient basis was done somewhere else. (Even the emergency visit was unusual circumstances. I needed an emergent consultation with an ophthalmologist, and it's hard to raise one on Christmas Day. He still talks about that one, several years later. It's the only time in his career that he's performed three emergency surgeries in the same day.) Clinics like this are quite common in American cities. Some are hospital outreach, where they've moved outpatient departments off site. Some are stand-alone. The stand-alone ones often bear the names of insurance networks: "Community Care Physicians", "Capital District Physicians' Health Plan", and so on, because many exist so that the practices can consolidate their billing and insurance negotiations. -- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
