The hospital has clinical departments of all medical specialties, and acts as a tertiary referral centre for the northern part of the province of South Holland.

Special units include: The LUMC aims at identifying the causes of disease, improving diagnosis, prevention, and ultimately developing effective treatments.

Combining cross-border expertise may solve biomedical problems and bring answers not found when working in a stand-alone fashion.

Several times, patients and professors moved to larger and better furnished premises and in 1873 the first university hospital to be built as such opened its doors on Steenstraat (it now houses the National Museum for Ethnology).

After World War II, fundamental research became an increasingly important task of Leiden University's Faculty of Medicine.

In 2016 Leiden University Medical Centre founded a branch at Campus The Hague, with research, teaching and a training programme for GPs.