Clinical activity
The ward
The clinic consists of two groups of doctors, academic physicians and members of the National Health Service, who have many years of experience in dealing with internal medicine diseases and provide high-quality inpatient medical care services for various diseases related to internal medicine. The annual number of hospitalized patients in the ward exceeds 1600 (1757 for 2023), with a median hospitalization remaining constant at 5 days despite the corresponding increase in hospitalized patients and patient days at the University Hospital of Heraklion according to the official data of the Greek Ministry of Health.
Outpatient clinics
The Internal Medicine Department has general medical outpatient clinics and special clinics. The special clinics are operated by qualified doctors with corresponding expertise in their field. Outpatient clinics are attended by specialist and resident doctors as part of their training. More specifically, there are medical clinics, hypertensive-metabolic clinics, hypertensive-pathological clinics, metabolic-obesity clinics, diabetes and metabolic disease clinics, geriatric clinics, infectious diseases clinics, and clinics for monitoring patients with HIV infection.
Infectious Diseases consultations
The Internal Medicine Department has experienced infectious disease specialists who are exclusively engaged in providing infectious disease advice to other clinics to achieve the best care of patients hospitalized for surgical or other reasons in the hospital and need infectious disease support as they often have complex medical problems, immunosuppression, or a complicated surgical course, which makes the investigation, diagnosis, and treatment of any infection a particularly demanding process.
Internal Medicine consultations
The Internal Medicine Department has a medical staff that deals exclusively with providing consultations in other wards to contribute to the best medical care for patients who have complex medical problems that require the cooperation of different specialties or direct treatment of infections, electrolyte disorders, or metabolic disorders, such as complications of diabetes.
Shifts
The Internal Medicine ward is on duty day after day. On general calls (when the hospital is accepting new patients in the emergency department), on weekdays, there is one specialist doctor on active call and one specialist doctor on mixed call, while on holidays, there are two specialist doctors on active call. As for in-house calls (days when the hospital is not accepting new patients in the emergency department), a qualified doctor is on call. Some qualified doctors are on duty every day and are actively involved in the clinical work of the ward. Specialist on-calls are all active.