Clinic

Clinic

Clinic is a health facility that is primarily focused on the care of outpatients. Large outpatient clinics vary in size, but can be as large as hospitals. Some clinics function as a place for people with injuries or illnesses to come and be seen by a triage nurse.

About Clinic in brief

Summary ClinicClinic is a health facility that is primarily focused on the care of outpatients. Clinics can be privately operated or publicly managed and funded. They typically cover the primary care needs of populations in local communities. Large outpatient clinics vary in size, but can be as large as hospitals. In Europe, especially in the Central and Eastern Europe, bigger outpatient health centres, commonly in cities and towns, are called policlinics. In Cuba, polyclinics have been credited with a role in improving primary health care. In China, for example, owners of such clinics do not have formal medical education. There were 659,596 village clinics in China in 2011. Health care in India, China, Russia and Africa is provided to those regions’ vast rural areas by mobile health clinics or roadside dispensaries.

Some clinics function as a place for people with injuries or illnesses to come and be seen by a triage nurse or other health worker. In these clinics, the injury or illness may not be serious enough to require a visit to an emergency room, but the person can be transferred to one if needed. Typical large outpatient clinics house general medical practitioners such as doctors and nurses to provide ambulatory care and some acute care services but lack the major surgical and pre- and post-operative care facilities commonly associated with hospitals. Besides GPs, if a clinic is a polyclinic, it can house outpatient departments of some medical specialties, such as gynecology.