Emergency department design

The emergency department is an integral unit of a hospital.The experience of patients attending the emergency department significantly influences the public image of the hospital. Its function is to receive, stabilise and manage patients who present with a large variety of urgent and non urgent conditions whether self or otherwise referred. The emergency department also provides for the reception and management of disaster patients as part of its role within the Disaster plan of each region. Increased patient flows are forcing changes in the design of hospital emergency departments, many of which have been stretched to capacity. As hospitals expand and renovate their emergency departments, they are guided by a number of considerations, including visibility, flexibility, efficiencies, disaster planning, security and patient care. In planning an emergency department, the goal is to move people efficiently through the system, to diagnose and stabilize them quickly with minimal or no backtracking. Virtually all emergency departments now have two entrances, one for patients brought by ambulances and the other for walk-ins. Increasingly, elderly and uninsured people are using the emergency departments for primary or basic care. On another project, close collaboration provided the answer to a hospital's need for a large-scale disaster without significantly overbuilding the department. The solution: Large triage rooms that can be combined to form treatment rooms, generous seating areas in family waiting rooms and extended stretcher holding areas. Key Words: Emergency Departmant Design, Hospital, Healthcare Buildings Design, Reconstruction of Emergency Departmants.