3. HOSPITAL CARE
There are different kinds of hospitals: mental hospitals, general hospitals, special hospitals, university hospitals. The ones that we refer to are the general hospitals and the university hospitals. These are hospitals where patients are treated mostly for somatic reasons. The difference between the two is that university hospitals have a direct relation with a medical faculty of a university. There have been a lot of mergers between hospitals these last few years. Small hospitals disappeared and the remaining hospitals grew bigger and bigger. At this moment there are about 110 general hospitals in the Netherlands and 9 university hospitals.
Hospital organization
The central way to organize the medical care in a hospital is by medical specialty. Every specialty, like internal medicine, surgery, has its own department. Within this department medical and nursing care are given. Nurses are the head of the nursing section, doctors are the head of the medical section. Besides these departments organized according to specialty, there are many auxiliary departments, like hotel services, automation and information and administration. Every hospital has a clinical part as well as an outpatient department. Most patients enter the hospital via the outpatient department. There he or she meets the specialist who decides what specialist investigations will be done and whether or not the patient will be admitted to hospital. If someone is admitted he or she enters the nursing ward. Here the patient meets different nurses than at the outpatient departments. The doctors that treat them, however, are the same as in the outpatient department.
All personnel has a wage earning contract except, in most cases, the specialists. In most general hospitals the medical specialists work together within partnerships that consist of
