A hospital is a health care institution providing patient treatment with specialized staff and equipment. The best-known type of hospital is the general hospital, which has an emergency department. A district hospital typically is the major health care facility in its region, with large numbers of beds for intensive care and long-term care. Specialized hospitals include trauma centers, rehabilitation hospitals, children's hospitals, seniors' (geriatric) hospitals, and hospitals for dealing with specific medical needs such as psychiatric problems (see psychiatric hospital), certain disease categories. Specialized hospitals can help reduce health care costs compared to general hospitals. A teaching hospital combines assistance to people with teaching to medical students and nurses. The medical facility smaller than a hospital is generally called a clinic. Hospitals have a range of departments (e.g., surgery, and urgent care) and specialist units such as cardiology. Some hospitals will have outpatient departments and some will have chronic treatment units. Common support units include a pharmacy, pathology, and radiology.
Hospitals are usually funded by the public sector, by health organisations (for profit or nonprofit), health insurance companies, or charities, including direct charitable donations. Historically, hospitals were often founded and funded by religious orders or charitable individuals and leaders. Today, hospitals are largely staffed by professional physicians, surgeons, and nurses, whereas in the past, this work was usually performed by the founding religious orders or by volunteers. However, there are various Catholic religious orders, such as the Alexians and the Bon Secours Sisters, which still focus on hospital ministry today, as well as several Christian denominations, including the Methodists and Lutherans, which run hospitals. In accord with the original meaning of the word, hospitals were originally "places of hospitality", and this meaning is still preserved in the names of some institutions such as the Royal Hospital Chelsea, established in 1681 as a retirement and nursing home for veteran soldiers.
Etymology
During the Middle Ages hospitals served different functions to modern institutions, being almshouses for the poor, hostels for pilgrims, or hospital schools. The word hospital comes from the Latin hospes, signifying a stranger or foreigner, hence a guest. Another noun derived from this, hospitium came to signify hospitality, that is the relation between guest and shelterer, hospitality, friendliness, hospitable reception. By metonymy the Latin word then came to mean a guest-chamber, guest's lodging, an inn. Hospes is thus the root for the English words host (where the p was dropped for convenience of pronunciation) hospitality, hospice, hostel and hotel. The latter modern word derives from Latin via the ancient French romance word hostel, which developed a silent s, which letter was eventually removed from the word, the loss of which is signified by a circumflex in the modern French word hotel. The German word 'Spital' shares similar roots.
Grammar of the word differs slightly depending on the dialect. In the U.S., hospital usually requires an article; in Britain and elsewhere, the word normally is used without an article when it is the object of a preposition and when referring to a patient ("in/to the hospital" vs. "in/to hospital"); in Canada, both uses are found.
Types
Some patients go to a hospital just for diagnosis, treatment, or therapy and then leave ('outpatients') without staying overnight; while others are 'admitted' and stay overnight or for several days or weeks or months ('inpatients'). Hospitals usually are distinguished from other types of medical facilities by their ability to admit and care for inpatients whilst the others often are described as clinics.
General
The best-known type of hospital is the general hospital, which is set up to deal with many kinds of disease and injury, and normally has an emergency department to deal with immediate and urgent threats to health. Larger cities may have several hospitals of varying sizes and facilities. Some hospitals, especially in the United States, have their own ambulance service.
Specialized
Types of specialized hospitals include trauma centers, rehabilitation hospitals, children's hospitals, seniors' (geriatric) hospitals, and hospitals for dealing with specific medical needs such as psychiatric problems (see psychiatric hospital), certain disease categories such as cardiac, oncology, or orthopedic problems, and so forth. In Germany specialized hospitals are called Fachkrankenhaus; an example is Fachkrankenhaus Coswig (thoracic surgery).
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 nonprofit basis by governments or charities. There are however a few exceptions, e.g. China, where government funding only constitutes 10% of income of hospitals.
Specialized hospitals can help reduce health care costs compared to general hospitals. For example, Narayana Hrudayalaya's Bangalore cardiac unit, which is specialized in cardiac surgery, allows for significantly greater number of patients. It has 3000 beds (more than 20 times the average American hospital) and in pediatric heart surgery alone, it performs 3000 heart operations annually, making it by far the largest such facility in the world. Surgeons are paid on a fixed salary instead of per operation, thus the costs to the hospital drops when the number of procedures increases, taking advantage of economies of scale.[6] Additionally, it is argued that costs go down as all its specialists become efficient by working on one "production line" procedure.
Teaching
A teaching hospital combines assistance to people with teaching to medical students and nurses and often is linked to a medical school, nursing school or university.
Clinics
The medical facility smaller than a hospital is generally called a clinic, and often is run by a government agency for health services or a private partnership of physicians (in nations where private practice is allowed). Clinics generally provide only outpatient services.
