What to Bring to the Emergency Room

If this may be life-threatening, call 911 and bring nothing. Nothing on this list is worth a minute.

If you only manage one thing, make it the list of medications. It is the single most useful object you can arrive with, it is the thing nobody else can reconstruct for you, and it changes clinical decisions in the first ten minutes.

Everything else on this page is convenience.

The one that actually matters

A list of every medication, with doses. Prescriptions, anything over the counter you take regularly, supplements, and inhalers or injectables.

Three reasons it outranks everything:

It changes what is safe to give you. Blood thinners after a head injury, beta blockers during an allergic reaction, metformin before contrast — each of those changes the plan immediately.

It changes what your symptoms might be. A surprising number of emergency presentations are a medication doing something, and that possibility is invisible without the list.

And nobody can look it up at 3am. Your pharmacy is closed, your own clinic is closed, and records do not follow you between unconnected systems as reliably as people assume.

The easiest version: photograph the labels now, on your phone, and keep the photos. Or bring the actual boxes in a bag — that is better than a remembered list, not worse.

Worth bringing if you can

• Photo ID
• Your insurance card, if you have insurance
• Your allergies, particularly to medications
• The name of your regular clinic or physician, for the follow-up
• A phone charger. Unglamorous, and you will be glad
• For a child: their immunisation record if it is to hand, and something familiar to hold
• For an older relative: their glasses and hearing aids. Someone who cannot hear the questions cannot answer them, and the assessment suffers for it

If something happened, bring the thing

This is the category people do not think of, and it is often decisive.

The medication bottle, if a dose may have been wrong or something was swallowed. The used auto-injector, if one was given. The plant, the insect, or a photograph of it if you were stung or bitten. The broken piece, if something went into a hand or a foot.

Bringing the object answers a question that fifteen minutes of careful history cannot.

What not to worry about

You do not need insurance to be seen. Ability to pay is not a barrier to assessment and access to care in our emergency rooms, and by law. If cost is the obstacle, tell us when you arrive.

You do not need an appointment or a referral. Neither, ever. Both emergency rooms are walk-in, open every hour of every day.

You do not need your records. Bring the medication list and the clinic name; we work from what is in front of us.

You do not need to have decided whether it is serious enough. That question is ours.

And you do not need to apologise for the hour. Nobody will ask why you did not come sooner.

What to leave at home

Valuables and anything you would mind losing. An emergency visit involves moving between rooms, changing clothes, and occasionally a transfer to another facility, and small objects do not survive that reliably.

If you are the person bringing someone else

You are more useful than you think, and specifically in four ways:

You know the timeline. What time it started, what it looked like before, what changed. The patient often cannot say, and under stress people compress time badly.

You know what normal looks like. “He is not himself” from someone who knows him is clinical information.

You can make the phone calls — the medication list, the regular clinic, the family.

And you can write things down. People remember roughly a third of what they are told in an emergency department, and the discharge conversation is the part worth having on paper.

Questions people actually ask

I have no ID and no insurance card. Can I still come? Yes. Come in.

Should I stop to get my medication list? If it takes a minute, yes. If it delays you at all for something serious, no — come now.

Can I bring my own medication and take it here? Bring it, and tell the team rather than taking anything yourself. Timing may matter.

Do you need my records from another doctor? No. The medication list and the clinic name are enough to start.

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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 →

Related reading: what happens when you walk in at 2am · how triage works