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A polyclinic is a clinic or health care facility that provides both general and specialist examinations and treatments for a wide variety of diseases and injuries to outpatients and is usually independent of a hospital.[1][2][3] When a polyclinic is so large that it is in fact a hospital, it is also called a general hospital.[4]
The term was rare in English until recently and is still very rare in Northern America, but examples include its use to refer to large outpatient clinics operated by the governments in England and Singapore that are able to provide a wider range of services than a standard doctor's (GP) office as well as The Polyclinic in Seattle, Washington, the United States.
Polyclinic has been and is however often used in English to refer to similar, usually large institutions in many other countries that are called "poliklinik" or similarly in other languages (and whose etymology is different).
The term policlinic (spelled similarly to and pronounced the same as polyclinic) is a very rare term in English sometimes used by American medical professionals for the outpatient clinic or outpatient department of European hospitals.
In Russian, "поликлиника" (poliklinika) is the word for a health clinic.[5]
See also
- Outpatient department of a hospital (rarely called policlinic in American English, and only when referring to European hospital outpatient departments)
- All pages with titles containing Polyclinic
- All pages with titles containing Outpatient
References
- ^ Company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing. "The American Heritage Dictionary entry: polyclinic". www.ahdictionary.com.
- ^ "Definition of POLYCLINIC". www.merriam-webster.com.
- ^ "polyclinic - Definition of polyclinic in English by Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries - English.
- ^ "polyclinic". CollinsDictionary.com. HarperCollins.
- ^ "поликлиника". Google Translate.