1. what a hospital is

A hospital is a place we go to when we are sick or injured and the medical care we need cannot be delivered in another setting.

In Australia, we can present to any public hospital's Emergency Department at any time, knowing that we will receive the attention of professionals with access to extensive diagnostic and treatment resources. We will be admitted under the care of a hospital specialist only if necessary.

We may also be admitted to a public hospital by a consultant physician of our own choice if s/he considers it necessary. Our length of stay in hospital will range between a few hours and several days. The costs of the foregoing, in whole or part, will be met from the public purse.

Institutions complying, more or less, with the foregoing, have developed eclectically, over more than two and a half millennia. From about 500 BCE, the peoples across ancient Greece, could attend Asklepions (sanctuaries to Asklepios) for health advice and treatment, often delivered overnight. Payment was optional and could be in kind or coin. Hippocrates and Galen operated from these facilities.

Many extant european hospitals were founded a millennium later in the middle ages; many still use buildings dating from the 15th and 16th centuries and many more from the 18th and 19th centuries.

At any time, most of modern Australia's principal referral hospitals will have several hundred and more in-patients (in bed), ranging from medium through high dependency to intensive care requiring life support and one on one nursing. They will employ three or four thousand staff, have annual operating expenditures of several hundreds of millions of dollars and beyond and their replacement values will be of similar magnitude. They will occupy in the order of one hundred thousand square metres of floor space some part of which will date from the 19th century.

Even so, few, if any such hospitals will provide all of the services which any community requires. They are essentially, co-operatively interdependent. Their development requires specialised management, planning and continuing co-ordination

hospitals. ancient antecedent, middle ages,

and modern principal referral

Asklepion, Messene. c 369 BCE