What’s the difference between a teaching and general hospital?
What is a teaching hospital?
Teaching hospitals are usually large and based in or near the centre of a region of the UK – usually in a big city.
They often have 600-1200 beds. They are linked to universities and usually have a linked medical school; where medical students are trained to be doctors. They are usually research centres as well.
They usually have the facilities listed in local general hospitals (see link below). Those smaller hospitals may act as ‘feeder’ hospitals to them – i.e. transferring patients to the teaching hospital for specialist care.
They also have specialist services for more serious and rarer diseases, like kidney dialysis and transplantation, cancer treatment and plastic surgery. Some have a major trauma centre with a helicopter etc.
What is a general hospital?
They are usually smaller local hospitals. They often have 300-500 beds. They used to be called District General Hospitals (DGHs). Most have a full range of services, e.g.
- Accident and Emergency (A&E) department (usually)
- Outpatient clinics
- X-ray department
- Operating theatres. Operations and procedures are done there
- Trauma and orthopaedics
- Procedure units (e.g. endoscopy)
- Medical and surgical wards
- Labour ward, and other Women and Childrens’ services
- Coronary Care Unit (CCU) and Intensive Care Unit (ICU)
- A Walk-in or Urgent Treatment Centre (UTC) or Minor Illness/Injury Unit (MIU).
They are general in the sense that they admit all types of medical and surgical cases, and they concentrate on patients with acute illnesses needing relatively short-term care.
In addition to the medical and surgical services relating to patient care, they will usually have a pharmacy, laboratories, and rehabilitation departments, e.g. physiotherapy and occupational therapy, speech and language therapy (SALT) and dietetics.
Smaller hospitals may diagnose and stabilise patients prior to transfer to such hospitals. They may in turn, diagnose and stabilise patients prior to transfer to teaching hospitals for specialist care.
Summary
We have described what’s the difference between a teaching and general hospital? Generally, teaching hospitals are larger and work in larger teams than general hospitals – and manage a greater variety of patients. These include patients with complex illness or rare conditions. There is also exposure to tertiary (highly specialist) practice, which is very useful for students and teaching.
