Your visit to the paediatric emergency department paediatric department

Care

The pediatric emergency department team welcomes you and is committed to providing quality care and making your wait as comfortable as possible.

How does your child's care begin?

When your child arrives at the pediatric emergency department, they will be welcomed by a nurse who specializes in receiving and directing sick children. During the initial assessment, this professional will listen to you and determine the severity of your child's medical or surgical problem based on their symptoms and factors such as temperature, breathing, pulse, pain, etc. In some cases, a pediatrician will be called in to help assess the severity of the condition in order to better guide the patient.

This initial rapid assessment is essential, as it allows your child's situation to be assigned a degree of urgency ranging from 1 to 5. This degree of urgency indicates the speed with which medical care will be provided.

The degrees of urgency correspond to the following values:

How and when do you see the doctor?

Medical care is provided immediately for all life-threatening emergencies (levels 1 and 2). In other situations, you will be directed to the waiting room. Treatment for fever or pain may be administered by the nurse at reception.

As soon as a consultation room is available, the nurse will show you in and your child will be examined by a doctor as soon as one is available. While you wait, a caregiver will regularly reassess your child's condition.

Is it possible to know how long the wait will be?

The staff can give you an estimate of the wait time at any time. However, this is only an approximation, as some patients who arrived after you may require more urgent care.

Once your child has been settled in and seen by the doctor, in some cases you may have to wait for test results or the opinion of a specialist who is not immediately available. In other cases, the doctor will need to monitor your child's condition, which may take several hours. This observation usually takes place in the day hospital.

Books and games are available; please feel free to ask a nurse for them. 

What happens once the examination and assessment are complete?

• You return home and the emergency doctor writes a medical report that will be sent to your pediatrician.
• Your child's condition requires monitoring for a few hours (up to a maximum of 3 p.m.) before a decision is made about hospitalization or returning home:  you will then be taken to the observation unit of the day hospital.
• Your child needs to be hospitalized. The role of the emergency team is to find the most suitable place for your child. Depending on how busy the hospital is, your child may have to wait until a bed becomes available, or they may need to be transferred to another center. In the meantime, your child will remain in the consultation room or be placed in the observation unit.

Before leaving the emergency department, feel free to ask the doctor any questions you may have about returning home and request any certificates you may need (for school, sports, work).

Billing

All of the steps described above will be included in the final bill. If you choose to leave the hospital before seeing a doctor, you will be billed for the assessment carried out by the nurse when your child was admitted and for any medication given. This service is covered by basic insurance.