Austin Health

About us

Austin Hospital's Emergency Department (or ED), is one of the busiest in the state, treating nearly 90,000 patients each year.

We have a state of the art Short Stay Unit with 24 beds which is capable of providing care for adults and children for up to 24 hours and mental health clients for up to 72 hours. Our ED is also home to two of our statewide services: the Victorian Poisons Information Centre and Toxicology Service.

For more information about being a patient or visitor of a patient in the Emergency Department, visit the emergency patient information page.

We offer an excellent training environment to attract some of the best nurses, doctors, nurse practitioners and allied health clinicians.

Important changes to parking and the ED triage process due to COVID-19

To ensure we can continue to provide safe, high quality emergency care to our community during the COVID-19 pandemic, Austin Health will be changing the access to our Emergency Department (ED) from Monday 27 April until further notice.

How can I access the Emergency Department?

• Pedestrian and vehicle access will continue via the current Emergency entrance in Burgundy Street
• Traffic management staff will be in place at the entrance to assist and direct you to the public drop off area
• You must stay in your car and wait for an ED nurse
• The ED nurse will ask you a few simple screening questions and then direct you where to go
• There will be no short-term parking at ED so you need to be prepared to drive out of the drop-off zone as soon as the ED nurse provides your instructions.

What does this mean for all adult patients?

• You will need a driver to drop you at ED. If the driver needs to come back into ED they will need to drive out to the car park, park and enter the ED following the signage/instructions within the hospital.

What does this mean for children or patients requiring assistance?

• The child or patient and their parent or carer will need a driver to drop them at ED. If the driver needs to come back into ED they will need to drive out to the car park, park and enter the ED following the signage/instructions within the hospital

What if no driver is available?

• If you don’t have another driver available in your household you may want to consider other forms of transport to ED such as taxi or ride share vehicles – these companies have precautions in place in relation to COVID-19 and are an option.

Please note: children presenting to the Emergency Department with a respiratory illness and assessed as requiring admission may need to be transferred to an alternative hospital.  The Emergency Department staff will be able to assist parents/caregivers with answering any questions that arise around this process.

Austin’s focus is on the safety, health and wellbeing of our staff and community, while ensuring patients can access quality and safe emergency care.

We will keep the community, patients and visitors updated about any changes. Questions and enquiries can be emailed to feedback@austin.org.au, via the online form on our website www.austin.org.au, or by calling 9496 3566.