Work the Bed and Zone Board

The bed and zone board is the ED floor map. Every active visit shows up as a card inside the physical zone it is in — Resus, Majors, Minors, Fast-Track, Paediatric, Observation or Waiting — with its ESI acuity, the bay it occupies, and flags for fast-track and for a breach (a visit that has waited past the department’s target). It is how the team sees, at a glance, who is where, who is waiting too long, and where the next patient should go.

Who / when: the ED nurse or ED physician works the board continuously through the shift — placing new arrivals, moving patients as their care progresses, and keeping an eye on the breach flags. We follow Grace Okoro placing the patients she has triaged.

1. ED nurse — open Emergency → Bed & Zone Board. Each zone is a card; the header counts how many patients are in it, and the page header counts the whole department. Use “Refresh” to pull the latest.
2. ED nurse — find the patient’s card. It shows their ESI pill, name, age and sex, bay, the stage they are at, the assigned clinician and how long they have waited.
3. ED nurse — press “Move” on the card, choose the target zone and type a bay / bed (e.g. “Bay 3”), then “Assign”. The patient jumps to the new zone with their bay shown.
4. ED nurse — to put a minor case into the rapid lane, press “Fast-Track” on the card (or “Exit Fast-Track” to take it back out). See Fast-Track a Minor Injury.

Note

The board reads live and renders a true empty state per zone — a zone with no patients says so rather than showing stale cards. A Breach pill means the visit has waited past the target; treat those as the next to action.

Tip

For a simpler view of the same patients arranged by stage rather than by zone — Triage, Waiting, In treatment, Awaiting results, Disposition — open Emergency → Tracking, which has a Full Screen button so it can run as a department wallboard.

What happens next

As patients move through their zones and the team finishes their workup, each visit heads toward a disposition. Patients who need a few hours of monitoring before that decision can be held in the observation unit.

Follow the trail

• Previous: Run a Resuscitation
• Next: Fast-Track a Minor Injury
• Related: Hold a Patient in the Observation Unit · Disposition a Patient