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Patient care and laboratories
In the Swiss healthcare system, the five university hospitals are responsible for providing virtually all of the country’s inpatient dermatology services. By contrast, outpatient care is available in both the private sector and public institutions (university and cantonal hospitals). The UHZ Department of Dermatology is the largest academic dermatology center in Switzerland and provides state-of-the-art inpatient medical care for complex and rare skin problems. The department’s skilled surgeons perform complex surgical and histologically controlled procedures, and the team is able to administer complex chemotherapeutic regimens and intravenous immunotherapy, including antibodies and fusion molecules. We also provide an extensive range of outpatient services, including highly specialized consultations. Our department benefits from an extensive referral base for these specialist activities and its own on-site histopathology laboratory.
therapies that are available, our capacity utilization has increased from 41% to 123%. We offset the resulting shortage of space and personnel by optimizing various processes, and are continuing to work on other improvements with the aim of making each patient’s stay at our daycare unit as comfortable as possible.
Skin cancer center – part of the Comprehensive Cancer Center Zurich Our department’s DKG-certified (DKG: German Cancer Society) skin cancer center is headed by Prof. R. Dummer and Dr. J. Mangana, who direct a team of expert skin
Outpatient unit (“Poliklinik”) and specialist care clinics Prof. R. Braun, and his team of dermatologists and specialist nurses treat over 22,000 patients on referral as part of more than 70,000 consultations a year. In contrast to general outpatient clinics, patients benefit from the expertise of international specialists in the fields of dermatology and venereology, and more specifically in autoimmune disorders, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, hidradenitis, acne and other severe dermatologic diseases, disorders of the hair and sculp, hyperhidrosis, pediatric dermatology, urticaria and more. The site is home to a weekly interdisciplinary wound clinic, which is organized in collaboration with the departments of vascular surgery, angiology, orthopedics and plastic surgery, and is intended for patients with chronic difficult-to-heal wounds.In our daycare unit, infusion therapies are administered in an outpatient setting. Most of our patients suffer from metastatic melanoma and are treated primarily using recently developed immunotherapies. These are highly effective treatment modalities. Further diseases treated at the daycare unit include inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, and cutaneous lymphoma. By relocating to a single room (C19), we have improved our monitoring capabilities, as it means one nurse and one physician can now be on site. The new, rapid point-of-care laboratory analysis system for blood samples reduces the duration of treatment. Due to the rapidly increasing number of immuno-
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“Skin health is our focus.” Prof. Ralph Braun Head Outpatient Clinic and Skin Cancer Prevention University Hospital Zurich
