The seat of both the 4th Department of Internal Medicine of First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University and the General Teaching Hospital (GTH) in Prague is in the street U Nemocnice 2, 128 08 Prague 2. The detached part of the Department is the Gastroenterological Division located at the Faculty Polyclinic of the GTH and residing at Karlovo náměstí 32, 120 00 Prague 2. The Department is a joint establishment of the First Faculty of Medicine and GTH.
The bearing specialty of the Department is hepatogastroenterology, the hepatogastroenterologic center (H-GE) of the Department being the only H-GE section of both the Faculty and the Hospital. The second bearing field is intensive care (IC). Within three years the Department is to become the IC methodical center for the internal specialties of the Faculty and the Hospital. The third field is general internal medicine, which imposes the duty to the Department to serve as an inpatient bed facility for the health district area.
The Department conduts H-GE examinations, advisory and consultant H-GE services and a 24-hour endoscopic service for the Hospital and Faculty units and other healthcare facilities. In indicated cases the Department admits patients to its own bed facilities (acute standard beds or intensive beds). Further, according to its bed capacity, it provides hospitalization care for patients with H-GE diseases from GTH and other healthcare facilities and if possible, also for the patients from specialized outpatient wards.
The Department accepts patients from the health district of Prague 2 and two other health districts of the former Prague-East. According to its capacity, it also admits to its intensive care (IC) sections patients with cardiovascular diseases and the critically ill . At the coronary unit (CU) and its intermediary part (the unit of follow-up coronary care, UFCC) are hospitalized all indicated patients with acute coronary syndrome, serious disorders of heart rhythm and therapeutically resistant forms of heart failure. The intensive care unit (ICU) and its intermediary section (the unit of nutritional support, NSU) admit to their beds indicated patients with non-cardiologic diagnoses, with the need of vital functions monitoring, the NSU offering mostly nutritional metabolic support to patients with internal diseases.
An integral part of the Department is the section of hyperbaric oxygenotherapy (HBO). It is the only place of its kind in GTH and one of the two not private facilities on the territory of the capital of Prague. The section offers treatment to both the hospitalized people and outpatients. At the same time it is the education center approved by the Association of Hyperbaric Medicine.
The Department renders pre-graduate instruction in internal medicine focusing at H-GE, intensive care, clinical propedeutics and student training for the state final examination in the extent required by the study program of the Faculty. The Department, respectively this center, has the accreditation for the H-GE specialty and participates in post-graduate H-GE education in cooperation with the cathedras of the Institute for Postgradualte Education in Healthcare and the Institute of Continuing Education in Healthcare.
The Department is one of the scientific centres of the Faculty and the Hospital. Research is carried out in cooperation of the clinicians with the Research Angiological Laboratory (RAL, the Department's unit), the Lipid Laboratory (LL) and the Hepatologic Laboratory (HL), the LL and HL being the joint places of the Department and the Institute for Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Diagnostics (ICBLD). The research activity of the Department focuses at diagnosis and treatment of H-GE diseases (reflux esophagial disease, idiopathic intestinal inflammations, cholelithiasis, diseases of the pancreas, colorectal carcinoma, chronic hepatitides, liver cirrhosis and its complications, metabolic liver disorders, portal hypertension, tumors of the liver and subhepatic region, malabsorption, metabolism of bile lipids), nutrition (diagnosis and treatment of malnutritions), some metabolic diseases (disorders of lipoprotein mechanisms, homocystein and diabetes mellitus), and cardioangiology (lyme carditis, non-invasive diagnostics of extracranial arteries).