Why Your ED Leadership Team Should Attend

The ‘90s was a decade of hospital consolidation with over 1,000 hospitals closing and the remaining hospitals operating at much increased capacity.  With fewer emergency departments in the country, those that remained have become busier and busier with the stress of patient volume and flow being an almost universal challenge. 

As a result of ongoing capacity issues, more and more EDs have expanded or are planning to expand.  But expanding, redesigning or building an all-new ED is a major undertaking with substantial risks. Will the expanded or new department meet the expectations of the staff?  Will patient flow be improved or will it actually worsen?  Will throughput times shorten or actually lengthen?  Will there be major regrets when the construction is complete?  What construction and flow ideas have turned out to be “winners” and what mistakes have others made that your hospital should avoid?  

ED managers often make multiple site visits to new or remodeled EDs to get advice and see what others have done.  These visits are often a costly and time-consuming process.  Come and spend three days (including travel) and hear the distillate of the experience of many colleagues who have gone through the process – hear what went well, what went wrong, what to avoid, what to seek out.  Be able to ask questions and dialogue with others who are all involved in updating their emergency departments.

Course Objectives

• This conference will address ED design for a multidisciplinary audience: ED managers (physician / nurse), hospital leaders, architects and hospital engineers.
• Discuss the key principles to consider in a renovation, addition, or new build of an Emergency Department.
• Present materials relevant to an audience of ED and hospital leaders, architects and hospital engineers regarding the different challenges related to ED patient volume, staffing considerations and departmental operations.
• Present Best Practice elements for ED design regarding performance.
• Allow ED leaders to participate in design exercises regarding important elements of an ED (patient rooms, intake areas, communication systems, etc.).
• Share speaker materials regarding design schemes and planning.
• Advise participants of common mistakes to avoid when remodeling, expanding or rebuilding an ED.

Course Sponsors

The Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance

The Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance (EDBA), founded in 1994, is a nonprofit association of 30 leading U. S. emergency departments whose managers are particularly interested in optimizing their EDs’ operations through measurement of ED processes, comparison with other members and identification of best practices. For the last 10 years the association has sponsored an annual conference focused on the optimization of ED performance. Emergency Department design is one of the primary determinants of patient flow and ED efficiency and, as such, the challenges of creating state-of-the-art departments is a key interest of the EDBA.

The Center for Medical
Education, Inc.

Founded in 1977, the Center for Medical Education has been providing physicians with a variety of educational products and services focusing primarily on the field of Emergency Medicine. The Center has over 10,000 subscribers to its monthly audio products (primarily Emergency Medical Abstracts [EMA] and EM:RAP [Emergency Medicine: Reviews and Perspectives]). The Center has conducted over 400 “live” conferences in the United States, Canada and Mexico with a total participation in excess of 45,000 physicians. In addition to its publications and courses, the Center has developed two commercial software programs aimed at optimizing ED data capture and record management.