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Public Teaching Hospitals The U.S. health care system relies on public teaching hospitals and their clinics and emergency departments, free-standing ambulatory care centers, chronic care facilities, hospices, and individual or group practices for service to vulnerable populations and the clinical education of physicians and other health care professionals. Thus, medical school and teaching hospitals have formed a dynamic partnership for health care, clinical education, and research application. The medical school is the intellectual home for these professionals, but the clinical facilities are the setting for interaction with patients and the transformation of laboratory findings to patient therapies. Public hospitals are special places that help the underserved and provide comprehensive and unique services for the general population. In addition to primary care and routine patient services, teaching hospitals also are centers for innovative and technically sophisticated services. Thus, these teaching hospitals are essential not only because they are the "classrooms" for physicians, nurses, and other health professionals, but also because they can use new therapies, surgeries, and technologies to treat and cure patients. As a result, the faculty and staff public teaching hospitals: ¨ Provide more care to Medicaid recipients and the uninsured than do their counterparts at non-teaching hospitals; HCMC charges for vulnerable populations exceed $200 million annually. ¨ Treat sicker patients, such as those referred from other hospitals and those requiring extensive support services; ¨ Ensure the transition of new services and technologies into the mainstream of American health care delivery; ¨ Provide many specialized inpatient and outpatient services such as organ transplantation, intensive neonatal care, oncology services, and sophisticated reconstructive surgery to the general population of a broad geographic area; and ¨ Offer staff trauma centers and burn units,
centralizing these costly services for many urban communities.
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