Emergency department to the wrong person. The ED is a riskier environment than other areas of the hospital due to medical practitioners not knowing the patient as well as they know longer term hospital patients, due to time pressure caused by overcrowding, and due to the emergency-driven nature of the medicine that is practiced there. Emergency department An emergency department (ED), also known as an accident & emergency department (A&E), emergency room (ER), emergency ward (EW) or casualty department, is a medical treatment facility specializing in emergency medicine, the acute care of patients who present without prior appointment; either by their own
Inova Alexandria Hospital pivotal role in creating the modern medical specialty of emergency medicine. Before this time, hospital emergency departments (EDs) (also called emergency rooms (ERs)) were generally staffed by physicians on staff at the hospital on a rotating basis, among them family physicians, general surgeons, internists, and a variety of other specialists. In many smaller emergency departments, nurses would triage patients and physicians would be called in based on the type of injury or illness. In 1961, an Alexandria Hospital general practice physician, Dr. James Mills, recognized that visits to the hospital's emergency department had rapidly increased while staffing had failed to