When you feel ill, the first person to contact is your General Practitioner or your GP in Hungary. This person is also referred to as a “family doctor”. They are familiar with a variety of symptoms, and they can suggest treatment or send you to see a specialist. They can also send you on sick leave. But how do you find your GP?
In Hungary, you are free to decide who you trust to be your doctor – this goes both for GPs and specialists. You can ask around for recommendations, and then choose any doctor you like. This is what many expats do, since for them it makes sense to have a GP who speaks English (or their mother tongue), and that is not something commonplace.
In line with this, you do not have a GP in Hungary by default – you must contact one on your own and see if they are willing to accept you in their practice. However, if you do not have any recommendations, you can start with the GP in charge of the area where you live (considering either your permanent or temporary address), because they must accept you in their practice, or they may be able to refer you who an English-speaking colleague.
To find out who your area doctor is, the easiest way is to ask your neighbors. In most apartment buildings, there is a bulletin board near the entrance; the name, address, and visiting hours of the area GP should be advertised there. You can also find out about your area doctor on the website of your local municipality (more on this below).
If you do not remember who your GP is, you can check it on the website of the Hungarian National Health Insurance Fund. Find the instructions here.
Although the GP in Hungary is often referred to as a family doctor, it is important to note that adults and children are treated separately. While there is always an area doctor for adults, for the same area the pediatrician (children’s doctor) will be a different person, and even their office might be at a different location. Moreover, to support the health of newborns and infants (and their mothers), there is a special network of nurses (“védőnői szolgálat”). Before setting out to find a GP, you should determine which of these you need.
Doctors’ offices are usually listed online, together with visiting hours. If you want to find your area GP in Hungary, after asking the neighbors and checking if there is a bulletin board in your house you can go to the website of your local municipality. Since these websites are all developed and maintained by the individual municipalities, they all look different; their intuitiveness and user-friendliness vary, while they are often available only in Hungarian.
Regarding general practices, each municipality is artificially divided into “areas”. To find your local GP, you should determine which area you belong to within your district. The area will depend on your exact address (street name and number as well), and areas are numbered. Once you know the area number, you can look up the GP in charge of that area.
Navigating the websites of the municipalities and the local clinics is not exactly easy, especially as they are in Hungarian. To make this more convenient, we have compiled a list for each district in Budapest (and added a few handy tips for other towns) so you can find the area you belong to and the visiting hours of your GP without too much effort.
Since the websites are mostly in Hungarian, here is a list of useful terms:
When looking up visiting hours, watch out for A/B weeks (odd or even number weeks). Sometimes visiting hours may alternate week by week, e.g. your GP may be available in the morning or in the afternoon on alternating Fridays (in the morning in “A” or “odd number” weeks, and in the afternoon in “B” or “even number” weeks).
Because of the pandemic, make sure to call or email your GP before you visit them.
If you do not live in Budapest, you can still find your area GP on the website of the municipality your address belongs to. From the municipality page, you might be redirected to the local clinic and the list of doctors. In most cases, the main page displays the contact data of the doctors, while there is an “areas” section on / accessible from the same page. Look for an obvious field, button, or hyperlink.
If you find any of this information on determining your GP in Hungary is out of date, or if you think we should add something to make this description even more useful, please feel free to send us a message – just fill in the form below.
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