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Concept
Clinic
Summary
A clinic (or outpatient clinic or ambulatory care clinic) 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, in contrast to larger hospitals which offer more specialized treatments and admit inpatients for overnight stays.
Most commonly, the English word clinic refers to a general practice, run by one or more general practitioners offering small therapeutic treatments, but it can also mean a specialist clinic. Some clinics retain the name "clinic" even while growing into institutions as large as major hospitals or becoming associated with a hospital or medical school.
The word clinic derives from Ancient Greek κλίνειν klinein meaning to slope, lean or recline. Hence κλίνη klinē is a couch or bed and κλινικός klinikos is a physician who visits his patients in their beds. In Latin, this became clīnicus.
An early use of the word clinic was "one who receives baptism on a sick bed".
Clinics are often associated with a general medical practice run by one or several general practitioners. Other types of clinics are run by the type of specialist associated with that type: physical therapy clinics by physiotherapists and psychology clinics by clinical psychologists, and so on for each health profession. (This can even hold true for certain services outside the medical field: for example, legal clinics are run by lawyers.)
Some clinics are operated in-house by employers, government organizations, or hospitals, and some clinical services are outsourced to private corporations which specialize in providing health services. 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 of which integrate traditional medicine.
Official source
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