UK HealthCare

UK HealthCare is the clinical enterprise of the University of Kentucky, centered on a medical campus in Lexington that includes Albert B. Chandler Hospital, Kentucky Children's Hospital, and Good Samaritan Hospital, along with a wide network of clinics and outreach sites. Its role in the state is distinctive. Kentucky's rural counties carry some of the heaviest chronic disease and cancer burdens in the country, and UK HealthCare functions as the referral endpoint for much of that need, drawing patients from Appalachia and across the commonwealth for care unavailable closer to home.

Clinical strengths include transplant, cardiology and cardiac surgery, neurosciences and neurosurgery, cancer care through the Markey Cancer Center, trauma and emergency services, and pediatric subspecialty care. Nurses practice across adult and pediatric intensive care, neonatal intensive care, transplant, cardiac and surgical step-down, medical-surgical, oncology, perioperative, emergency, and labor and delivery units, with acuity reflecting a quaternary academic center rather than community volume. As the teaching partner for the university's colleges of medicine, nursing, and health sciences, the system trains students throughout its facilities. For nurses, employment offers movement between academic and community hospital settings within one organization.