Three Health Services Combined in New Facility

The new facility in action in Building 56

The University Health Services (UHS), which recently moved to its newly renovated facility in Building 56, promises to offer a modern-style and more efficient service to its users. It will now combine all family medicine clinics, including private clinics, resident and student training clinics, and the Gulbekian Infirmary.

The new facility incorporates seven clinics continuously operated by 16 physicians, as well as three training clinics run by medical students and residents. "So, in total we can receive 30 patients per hour and we have a total of 10 operational clinics," said Dr. Ghassan Hamadeh, the director of UHS.

A new feature of UHS is an electronic tracking system for appointments. It is projected on an LCD mounted in the patient waiting room to display the appointment time and the corresponding physician and patient file number.

"The plan to move to a new facility was conceived around three years ago. We have been merging multiple clinics in order to cut down on redundancy of expenditures and to associate the medical practice with an official academic unit [Family Medicine]," said Dr. Hamadeh.

"This is a welcome change that provides for the handling of different kinds of patients. There are the private payers, the patients of the pre-paid university health plan (also known as the Hospital Insurance Plan or HIP), and the out-patients treated for free by medical students and residents. As such, our goal is to offer the same quality of service to patients of all three categories," he added.

The University Health Services started as a one room dispensary in 1945, as part of the Department of Internal Medicine. Gulbekian Infirmary was then erected as a place of treatment and recuperation in 1949 on the north side of the Green Oval, following a gift of 10,000 pounds sterling by Calouste Sarkis Gulbekian in memory of his father and mother. It was opened in 1950, and the UHS then became an administrative part of the Faculty of Medicine.

With the establishment of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) in 2004, a groundbreaking ceremony for the institute's building was held at AUB in December 2004 at the site of Gulbekian Infirmary. IFI's new complex, designed by the London-based Zaha Hadid architectural firm, is set to replace the Gulbekian Infirmary building in the near future.

As for Building 56, it served as the main unit of the American University Hospital from 1951 to 1970, and following renovation, began service as the School of Nursing in 1972. The building was donated to AUB by the Dodge family in memory of Bayard Dodge Jr., who was killed in action in World War II. Major restructuring was initiated in February 2005, and Building 56 is now a five-story structure that includes the Computing and Networking Services of AUBMC, the Children's Cancer Center of Lebanon (affiliated with the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital}, the Abu-Haidar Neuroscience Institute, the Psychiatry Wing, the Naef K. Basile Cancer Institute, and the UHS.