Emergency Room

Proximity and specialization of medical emergency services

All medical emergency services offer outreach intake. Some pathologies, however, require a more specialized intake, offered only at the Civico site in Lugano (adult intake) and at the San Giovanni site in Bellinzona (pediatric intake).

If the patient accesses the facilities via pre-hospital emergency services (ambulance or helicopter), the pre-hospital emergency service will accompany the patient to the nearest and most appropriate medical emergency facility to respond to the health problem.

Emergency codes in the emergency room.

At the ER facilities, the patient undergoes all investigations and receives urgent care, and is then either admitted to the appropriate ward, or discharged with directions to the family physician or for further outpatient visits and investigations.

Citizens arriving at EOC emergency rooms are greeted by a triage nurse, who assesses the problem and assigns a priority code called SETS 1 to 4.

• SETS 1: are the most urgent and are handled immediately by the medical-nursing team in the REA room.
• SETS2: are the situations of potentially evolving urgency, therefore to be evaluated as soon as possible.
• SETS 3 and 4: are the less serious conditions, for which there may be a somewhat longer waiting time. However, the EOC has implemented specific pathways for low intensity where non-serious cases can be assessed more quickly.

This process involves staying in the ER for a more or less prolonged time, given the priority of managing conditions that need immediate treatment. In all cases, efforts are made to provide all patients with the best possible comfort in addition to the necessary care.

Triage in the emergency room

Emergency medicine services have the goal of ensuring that every citizen receives appropriate, competent and safe care for the health problem suffered.

In order to ensure the achievement of this goal, it is necessary to define criteria for the assessment of severity, urgency and consequently the priority of care appropriate to the specific situation of the patient.

To do this, emergency services apply the Swiss Emergency Triage Scale (SETS) triage system (from the French trier = select/sort). Through initial assessment by properly trained and educated nursing staff, a patient is assigned a degree of urgency, which determines their access to care: the most serious and urgent cases access care first.

For this reason, depending on the number of serious patients present or arriving, there may be extended waiting times.

In such cases, patients with a less serious health condition may be offered by the attending staff to arrange a visit to the local picket doctor, the attending physician, or to the emergency medical service of another EOC location.