Clinic

A clinic (or outpatient clinic or ambulatory care clinic) is a healthcare facility that is primarily devoted to the care of outpatients. Clinics can be privately operated or publicly managed and funded, and typically cover the primary healthcare needs of populations in local communities, in contrast to larger hospitals which offer specialised treatments and admit inpatients for overnight stays. Most commonly, the word clinic in English refers to a general medical practice, run by one or several general practitioners, or a specialist clinic. Some clinics grow to be institutions as large as major hospitals, or become associated with a hospital or medical school, while retaining the name “clinic."

Overview

Clinics are often associated with a general medical practice, run by one or several general practitioners or clinics are usually operated by physiotherapists and psychology clinics by clinical psychologists, and so on for each health profession. Some clinics are operated in-house by employers, government organizations or hospitals and some clinical services are outsourced to private corporations, specialising in provision of health services. In China, for example, owners of those clinics do not have formal medical education. There were 659,596 village clinics in China in 2011. Health care in India, China, Russia and Africa is provided to vast rural areas by mobile health clinics or roadside dispensaries, some of which integrate traditional health practices. In India these traditional clinics provide ayurvedic medicine and unani herbal medical practice. In each of these countries traditional medicine tends to be a hereditary practice.

Surgery (politics)

A political surgery (in British politics) or clinic is a series of one-to-one meetings that a Member of Parliament (MP) may have with his or her constituents, at which a constituent may raise issues of local concern. The issues may relate to local issues (street crime, litter, a request for intervention by the MP on behalf of the constituent with local or national government) or it could deal with national policy matters.

It is up to each MP to decide whether they have any surgeries at all or if so, how many and in what locations. MPs often use local party offices, church halls or rooms in public houses as the venues, with a number of surgeries possibly being held at different locations around a constituency. Surgeries are traditionally held on weekends when MPs have returned from sittings of parliament in Westminster.

The number of such meetings can be influenced by whether an MP's seat is considered safe (i.e., in the normal course of events, their party's level of support is such that they cannot lose it in a general election), or marginal (one that can easily be lost). The more marginal the seat, the greater the number of surgeries an MP may choose to have. In addition, how clientelist a political system is impacts on the need for surgeries. The more clientelist a political system (i.e., the more it is based on local representation for constituents as opposed to an MP's participation in national politics) the greater the number of surgeries may be required.