Within the Iris Network, the Saint-Pierre Hospital is considered a pioneer in the field of infectious diseases and in providing care to all, including the weakest. As early as the 12th century, there was a leper house attached to the Saint-Pierre chapel. In more modern times, thirty years ago, Professor Nathan Clumeck, who was responsible for the creation of the Infectious Diseases department at the Saint-Pierre Hospital, gained an international reputation for being the first person to diagnose a seropositive African patient and to describe the mode of heterosexual transmission in The Lancet.
In the early s, the Infectious Diseases department was the first in Belgium to develop a disease management philosophy based on a combined medical, psychological and social approach. Patients suffering from infectious diseases are no longer considered simply as biological patients but as individuals living their lives within a society.
These global and multidisciplinary approaches have now been introduced across all IRIS Network hospitals. It is recognised by the international community, for the support it offers to patients and for its research activities.
CETIM has been successful in acquiring external funding to develop an approach to patient care, that places the patient at the centre of its concerns. This is in line, both with its mission within the public hospitals network and with the approaches to patient support, developed by its practitioners. The unit comprises a multidisciplinary medical team specialists in infectious diseases, hepatologists, gynaecologists, psychiatrists, etc.
Its team has implemented a post-exposure prophylaxis policy which, each year, sees hundreds of people, who have been exposed to risk with individuals, who are HIV positive sexual relations, shared needles, etc. Tuberculosis is a disease that affects people who are poor and live in precarious socio-economic circumstances; it therefore concerns a large number of immigrants, currently mainly from eastern Europe.
