What Happens If You Need to Be Admitted

If this may be life-threatening, call 911. Paramedics begin treatment on the way and can tell us you are coming.

Our emergency rooms are freestanding, which means they are emergency departments without an inpatient hospital attached. So if you need a hospital bed, you do not get one here — you get stabilised here and moved to one.

People find that alarming when they hear it for the first time, and then reassuring once they understand what it actually involves. So this page is the second part.

Three ways a visit ends

You go home, with an explanation, written instructions, and a clear sense of what should bring you back. This is what happens most of the time.

You stay here and are watched. Our emergency rooms have the capability to hold and monitor a patient for up to 24 hours where observation is the right call rather than admission. Quite a lot of questions resolve in that window — whether a pain is settling, whether a second set of blood work has changed, whether somebody can keep fluids down.

You are transferred. Where you need to be admitted, or need hospital-level inpatient care, we treat and stabilise you here and arrange the move.

What “stabilise and transfer” actually means

It is not a handoff at the door. The sequence is:

You are assessed and treated first. Emergency intervention happens here, now, with CT, X-ray and a full laboratory in the building. Whatever needs doing in the first hour gets done in the first hour.

The decision is made on evidence rather than a guess. By the time a transfer is arranged, somebody knows what is wrong, or at least knows enough to say what kind of bed and what kind of specialist you need. That is a materially different transfer from one arranged on a hunch.

Then the receiving facility is arranged and you are moved — by ambulance, with your imaging, your laboratory results and the treatment already given travelling with you.

You do not arrange any of this. It is not a referral you have to chase, and it is not your job to find a hospital with a bed.

Why this is the design and not a gap

Three consequences follow from having no inpatient hospital attached, and all three are in your favour while you are in the building:

There is no inpatient census competing for the team’s attention. Nobody is being pulled upstairs to a ward.

We are not absorbing ambulance diversions for a hospital campus. The department is not the overflow valve for a building full of admitted patients.

Everyone in the building is an emergency patient. It is one department rather than a campus, and that is the whole of its job.

None of that is a promise about your visit. It is a description of how the building works.

What it does mean for you, honestly

Two things, and it would be dishonest to leave either out.

If you need admission, there is a move. That is a transfer by ambulance rather than a lift to a different floor, and it takes time — the time to find the right bed and the time to travel.

And for some conditions the right answer is to go somewhere else first. If what you need is an operating theatre or a specialist service, the nearest emergency room may not be ours, and the paramedics choosing a destination know that better than a website does.

Which is why the routing advice on every page of this site is the same: for anything life-threatening, call 911 and go to the nearest emergency room — the nearest one, not the one you usually use, and not one of ours if something closer exists. Minutes matter more than continuity.

Questions people actually ask

Will I be charged twice — once here and once at the hospital? There are two facilities involved, so there can be two sets of billing. That is worth asking about directly, and the billing team is the right place for it rather than this page.

Can I choose which hospital I go to? Say your preference. What is actually available depends on which facilities have an appropriate bed and the right specialty at that moment, and that changes hour to hour.

Does my family follow the ambulance? Ask before you are moved so that everyone leaves with the same destination. It is the detail most often lost in a rushed few minutes.

Do my scans and results go with me? Yes. The point of being worked up here is that the receiving team starts with the answers rather than repeating the questions.

Would it have been faster to go straight to a hospital? Sometimes, and for a genuine emergency the calculation is usually the other way round: the nearest door that can start treatment is the one that helps most. For anything life-threatening, call 911 and let them route you.

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Both of our emergency rooms are open 24 hours a day, every day of the year — walk in, no appointment and no referral, with CT, X-ray and a full laboratory in the building. Find your nearest emergency room →

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