The Outpatient Care Centre of the Clinical Centre of the University of Debrecen is situated in Bethlen Street, which is in the heart of the city. Therefore, it is easily accessible on foot, by car or several means of public transport. The catchment area of the Centre includes the city of Debrecen and most of the territory of Hajdú-Bihar county. It is one of the largest care centres in Hungary: about 2,000 hours of specialist consultations are provided a week, and roughly 360,000 patient-doctor meetings take place in our Specialist Care Centre a year.
This Institution can rightly be called a multidisciplinary facility providing a wide range of specialist consultations and services. We have a capacity of 73 specialist offices (and auxiliary rooms), where specialists belonging to 39 different specialties provide care for adult and pediatric patients alike. Their work is supported by high-capacity diagnostic testing (blood sampling, radiology examinations), and auxiliary units (physical therapy, gym, infusion room). The diagnostic units of the Centre also perform the tests required by general practitioners. Due to personality rights or epidemiological reasons, an integral part of our outpatient services (psychiatry, pulmonology, dermatology, breast screening) were established and are now provided at locations other than the central building, namely at the premises located in Varga Street, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Street and Jerikó Street.
In addition to specialist consultation offices, the central building also hosts a pharmacy, an optician’s, a medical aid store, a shop selling hearing aid devices, dental care providers, and a DEXA laboratory operated by external partners. Naturally, the Outpatient Care Centre does not operate in isolation, but in close cooperation with specialist consultations requiring personnel and technology that can only be provided by institutions located on the premises of the Clinical Centre or the Kenézy Campus. Also, these institutions can provide the inpatient care for our patients, if needed.
As the capacity of the Outpatient Specialist Care Centre is quite high, we have a high number of patients presenting at our consultations every day, which made it necessary to develop and run a modern appointment making and patient management system. The introduction of this system resulted in reducing the number of waiting patients and the time spent waiting in the waiting halls. Patients arrive by appointment, and in ¾ of the cases they can leave the premises of the centre within half to one hour after they are attended to. A special system was introduced to help patients’ orientation in our large building. Patients are called into the consultation room on the basis of the number they get at the reception, which is consistent with the provisions of the strictest data protection legislation.
As a further step to enhance patient care, we introduced consultation hours outside the normal working hours.
Dr. Tibor Tóth
head of the centre