OBJECTIVE To assess the compliance with national guidelines on child protection procedures and provision of paediatric services in major English emergency departments. BACKGROUND Victims of child abuse may present to emergency departments, and successful detection and management depends on adequate child protection procedures being in place. Two official documents published in 1999 provide re...

In Denmark emergency departments are newly established and still in a process of devising their procedures and technology support. Electronic whiteboards are a means of supporting clinicians in creating and maintaining the overview necessary to provide quality treatment of patients. The concrete meaning of the notion of overview is, however, fussy. To explore the notion of overview and how it m...

OBJECTIVE Digit preference bias has previously been described in a number of different clinical settings. The paper aimed to assess whether digit preference bias affects the recording of the time patients arrive and leave emergency departments. METHOD An observational study of 137 emergency departments in England and Wales was conducted. Each department was asked to submit details of the time...

AIM To determine whether there were any changes in attendance at accident and emergency departments that could be related to international football matches (Euro96 tournament). METHOD Fourteen accident and emergency departments (seven adjacent to and seven distant from a Euro96 venue) provided their daily attendance figures for a nine week period: three weeks before, during, and after the tou...

International emergency medicine aims to understand different systems of emergency care across the globe. To date, however, international emergency medicine lacks common descriptors that can encompass the wide variety of emergency care systems in different countries. The frequent use of general, system-wide indicators (e.g. the status of emergency medicine as a medical specialty or the presence...