Hospitals

A hospital is a place where patients can go to seek medical treatment. Medical treatment at hospitals ranges from emergency care, surgery, and basic checkups and many more. Often times people are terrified to go to the hospital out of fear of hearing bad news. A hospital may be a government funded state hospital or a privately own one. Another word for a hospital is a clinic, where people can go to receive free service from a non profit or government group. The best-known type of hospital is the general hospital, which is set up to deal with many kinds of disease and injury, and typically has an emergency department to deal with immediate and urgent threats to health. General hospitals typically are the major health care facility in a area, with large numbers of beds for intensive care and long-term care. Many times a hospital may be a specialized facilities for surgery, plastic surgery, childbirth, bio assay laboratories etc… Larger cities may have several hospitals of varying sizes and facilities. Some facilities, especially in the United States, have their own ambulance service. Types of specialized hospitals include trauma centers, rehabilitation rehabiliation, children’s facilities, seniors’ facilities, and facilities for dealing with specific medical needs such as psychiatric problems, certain disease categories etc…A hospital may be a single building or a number of buildings on a campus. Many hospitals with pre twentieth century origins began as one building and evolved into campuses. Some hospitals are affiliated with universities for medical research and the training of medical personnel such as physicians and nurses, often called teaching hospitals. Worldwide, most hospitals are run on a non profit basis by governments or charities. Within the United States, most hospitals are nonprofit.

While hospitals, by concentrating equipment, skilled staff and other resources in one place, clearly provide important help to patients with serious or rare health problems, facilities also are criticized for a number of faults, some of which are endemic to the system, others which develop from what some consider wrong approaches to health care. One negative thing about hospitals is the nature of care, with constantly shifting treatment staff, which dehumanizes the patient and prevents more effective care as doctors and nurses rarely are intimately familiar with the patient. The high working pressures often put on the staff exacerbate such rushed and impersonal treatment. The architecture and setup of modern facilities often is voiced as a contributing factor to the feelings of faceless treatment many people complain about. Another problem is that these facilities are in themselves dangerous places for patients, who are often suffering from weakened immune systems, either due to their body having to undergo substantial surgery or because of the illness which placed them in the hospital itself. Most of these issues stem from the way operations are conducted day to day. However, even in modern facilities, infections can be an important cause of hospital related morbidity, and sometimes mortality. The best kind of facility is one that teaches a group of students of interns how to be doctors, these hospitals are known as teaching ones, and those facilities that manage to teach and still provide quality care are the best kind.