A hospital’s goal is to save lives, although its services can vary greatly depending on the facility’s size and location. Hospitals typically have a range of departments that can be categorized into intensive and non-intensive care units. Intensive care units deal with emergencies, serious illnesses, and injuries. Non-intensive care units include things like childbirth, surgery, and rehabilitation.

Blood is essential for human life, and it can’t be fully synthesized – only donated. These facilities allow donors to give blood while also storing and sorting it into components to supply the patients who need it. Sometimes patients need specific components and sometimes they just need lots of blood. For example, a single traffic accident patient could require as much as 50 litres of blood.

Clinics and medical offices are facilities for diagnosing and treating outpatients. These healthcare facilities can be a physician’s private practice, a group practice setting or a corporately owned clinic that may be connected to a larger healthcare system or hospital.
The goal of these clinics is to give people preventative care and important medical and dental diagnoses with as much convenience as possible.

Diabetes is a serious and widespread illness. Many people have diabetes and don’t know it. Additionally, large parts of the population are at risk for diabetes, in a condition called prediabetes. Diabetes education centers help patients manage their disease or people at risk to avoid it. Patients with kidney disease often need regular dialysis, to filter and clean the blood artificially—the work functioning kidneys normally take on.

Hospices are specific healthcare facilities that specialise in end-of-life care. They provide not only medical support, but also emotional and even spiritual support for patients and their families. Care homes offer a living situation for patients whose medical needs aren’t severe enough for hospitals but are too serious to manage at home. Some may be younger patients with serious long-term illnesses who need professional care.

A birthing centre aims to create an environment that feels more comfortable to the mother and allows for a cost-effective, family-inclusive birth. Birth centres are not typically equipped with the same contingency equipment and staff as a hospital, such as surgeons in case of a C-section or neonatal intensive care units. As a result, birth centres accommodate only healthy pregnancies without any known risk or complication factors.

These facilities offer diagnostic imaging services to patients, including CT scans, ultrasound, X-rays, MRIs and more. These outpatient facilities help keep costs lower and allow more convenient scheduling for patients. Hospitals will likely still handle imaging for urgent cases; but imaging that can be scheduled in advance, such as ultrasounds to monitor a pregnancy, could take place at an imaging center.

Mental health treatment facilities exist to assist patients through different stages of their healing processes. At the acute-care level, there are mental health wards in hospitals, as well as hospitals specifically devoted to mental health and long-term care facilities. Addiction treatment centers typically deal with drug and alcohol addictions, as well as problematic behavioral addictions like gambling.

Orthopedic medicine deals in everything from athletic injuries to therapy for patients with disabilities. They typically offer evaluation and diagnosis of the problem, as well as prevention and treatment. Rehabilitation centers help restore patients’ abilities after an illness or injury. Physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy are all processes that help people gain or regain skills they need in daily life.

Urgent care facilities exist for on-demand healthcare needs that aren’t severe enough for the emergency room but are too severe or concerning to wait for a scheduled appointment at the doctor’s office. Urgent care is a common choice when children get sick, for example, and need an immediate diagnosis or relief from symptoms. The providers in this sector are experts in acute care.