A/the clinic(s) that open(s) out of regular official hours of a hospital

Question

I was requested to write that [A/the clinic(s) that open(s) out of regular official hours of a hospital] as a noun phrase, supposedly a concise and natural-sounding one.

There are several issues for me to come up with the noun phrase.

Singular vs. plural: This is a clinic (or clinics?) run by a hospital (let's say the hospital's name is Springfield). I'm not sure if I should think of the clinic as a singular or plural noun. Physically, there are several such clinics located all over the hospital. However, I think it's possible to think of all of them collectively as a clinic.

Out of regular official hours sounds somewhat awkward to me. I thought of a few alternatives such as non-standard hours or non-regular hours, but I'm afraid that the terms might be non-standard, and they might not convey the intended meaning precisely.

The use of apostrophe s: Supposed that I could come up with such a noun phrase (I currently use An out-of-regular-official-hours clinic), can I use the [X's Y] pattern? Or it has to be [Y of X]?

For example,

• N1: Springfield's Out-of-Regular-Official-Hours Clinic
• N2: A Springfield's Out-of-Regular-Official-Hours Clinic
• N3: The Springfield's Out-of-Regular-Official-Hours Clinic

I think N1 might work, but both N2 and N3 are risky. The genitive case (Springfield's) seems not to get along with the articles (a/the) quite well.

How should I phrase it (the noun phrase)?

Answer 1

Let's take the easy part first.

What you're talking about is a clinic belonging to Springfield Hospital, and so you properly use the possessive form (in English you don't normally call it the "genitive" as you would in more highly inflected language). Let's simplify the phrase by using a simpler possessive: "my." This gives you:

My clinic

You are correct that an English speaker would never say "A my clinic" or "The my clinic," so you can't use those articles with "Springfield's" either. You might be able to use an article with "Springfield" if you use it as a location, rather than a possessive:

The Sixth Street Clinic

The Bellevue Hospital Clinic

The Fourth Floor Clinic

In this case, however, you need to drop the 's. You would not use "a" on its own, although you could use it after another name to indicate that it was one of many clinics:

The Wonderful World of Gastroenterology, a Bellevue Hospital Clinic

Now, on to the adjective:

You should not use the phrase "out-of-regular-official-hours." It sounds extremely awkward in English. First of all, the phrase "official hours" in itself is not particularly idiomatic. You would be more likely to hear something along the line of "business hours" or "office hours."

In this case, however, your best bet is to just drop the "official," since "official" and "regular" play basically the same role in this sentence. A hospital's regular hours will be understood by an English speaker as the hours in which it is normally open. "Official" adds nothing.

In fact, in this case, you don't even need "regular." After hours is a well-understood idiom that means "outside of normal business hours." If you call this:

The Springfield Hospital After-Hours Clinic

an English speaker will understand that it is a clinic, it is associated with the hospital, and that it is open later than the hospital as a whole. Even a 24-hour clinic, which is also open before the hospital in the morning, I would expect to be described as "after hours."

As for whether it should be singular or plural...that is not a grammatical decision. If it operates as one clinic, even if it is in separate locations, then it's singular; if it doesn't, it's plural.

Answer 2

While 'After Hours' works, there is a slight implication (possibly untrue) that the clinic is only open after the main part of the hospital closes. If this is the case, 'After Hours' is great.

'Extended Hours'is a common phrase for when a business is open later or earlier than it normally is, or later than one might expect. So if the hospital closes early in the evening, and the clinic is open longer, the clinic has extended hours. So 'Extended Hours Clinic' is a good phrase, and is common in the US for many types of businesses. This phrase is better if the clinic is open at the same time as the hospital, but also stays open later.

Or you could specifically reference the time the clinic is open in the phrase. 'All-night clinic', or 'Late-night Clinic', or 'Evening Clinic', depending on the time it closes.