Our missions
Our network pursues several missions: a medical and care mission, a social and public service mission, an academic teaching and research mission.
OUR MEDICAL AND CARE MISSION
Like every hospital, our first responsibility is to provide care for patients. They are our raison d’être, at the centre of every step we take and of all our attention. They justify the efforts, investments, recruitments and choices that we make each and every day. Finally, they motivate our ongoing concern to improve the knowledge, techniques and technologies of diagnosis and of care for the widest range of pathologies.
OUR SOCIAL MISSION AND PUBLIC SERVICE
Like every public service, we have a bounden duty of accessibility for all our fellow citizens. In this respect, our prime responsibility is to receive all patients without any social, economic, philosophical or religious discrimination. To facilitate this reception, we have opted to distribute hospital sites over several zones in the Region and to offer the widest range of care possible on these local sites. Furthermore, we have developed our social services considerably to help the most vulnerable patients gain access to care in our facilities. They guide and assist patients and relatives to solve administrative, financial, relational or social difficulties relating to their illness, treatment in the hospital and care at home or in another institution.
OUR ACADEMIC TEACHING AND RESEARCH MISSION
All of us in the network are bound by the Public and Academic Hospital Service status. This double specific feature is a founding value of our network with an extraordinary range of missions, including scientific emulation and the concern to train optimally the next generations of practitioners. It should be borne in mind that the academic nature of the iris network is an intrinsic part of its history. More specifically, the hospitals of the network originally constitute the core of internship hospitals for the Faculty of Medicine at the (French-speaking) Free University of Brussels. Today, the teaching and training activity is highly developed for both medical students and specialists, but also for nursing and paramedical students. Our (essentially clinical and translational) research activities are an international showcase and a magnet for doctors interested in a scientific career, and especially a guarantee for medical quality and access to the most innovative techniques for the sake of our patients.