Skip to content

A day in the life of... the A&E nurse

Posted under Nursing

How does nursing in an A&E department differ from other roles in the NHS?

22 Apr
2003

Production team Creenagh Williamson A and E nurse

Creenagh Williamson is a senior staff nurse in the Accident and Emergency (A&E) Unit at the East Surrey Hospital in Redhill. She has an extremely busy day and we see her caring for a woman with acute back pain, a drunk man with cuts and bruises and also a young woman who has had a fit and whose heart has stopped beating.

Q. What is it like to work in an A&E department?

A.The day portrayed in A Picture of Health was fairly typical. On a typical day in the NHS hospital Accident & Emergency (A&E) departments will treat more than 33,000 people. Over the winter this is expected to increase and in December, on average there are 15% more emergency admissions than there are in August.

‘Trolley waits’ are a long standing problem for A&E departments

This report was published by the Audit Commission on 25 October 2001. It focuses on four objectives of A&E Departments, namely: waiting times – minimising the time patients have to wait for treatment in the department; staff – making efficient and effective use of staff; quality – delivering a high-quality service; and information – having good management information.

The BBC and the Open University are not responsible for the content of external websites

Rate and share this page:

You haven't rated. Average rating 3 out of 5, based on 1 rating

Share this page:

.

More like this

Comments

Be the first to post a comment.

Login or Register to post comments

Article Information

Publication details
Tuesday, 22nd April 2003
Tuesday, 22nd April 2003

Copyright information
• Body text - Copyrighted: The Open University
• Image 'Creenagh Williamson A and E nurse ' - Copyrighted: Production team

Article Feeds

If you enjoyed this, why not follow a feed to find out when we have new things like it? Choose an RSS feed from the list below. (Don't know what to do with RSS feeds?)
Remember, you can also make your own, personal feed by combining tags from around OpenLearn.

About OpenLearn

Hide

Explore

Try

Study

OU Courses

OpenLearn Now

Hide

Tag Clouds

Hide

Site Cloud

What are Tag Clouds?

My Cloud

Discover the latest about your passions - Sign In or Register and start a personal tag cloud.

What are Tag Clouds?
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/flash/tagcloud.swf

Creative Commons License Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, content on this site is made available
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence

/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/