Standards in accident and emergency medicine

There are numerous standards currently available that relate to accident an d emergency medicine. Some of these relate to organizational structure; oth ers are clinical and relate either to the process of care or to outcomes. F ew, if any, deal explicitly with the dimensions of quality mentioned in rec ent white papers about the NHS, It is suggested, to maximize the effect standards have on care, that they s hould be developed for existing technologies not just for novel ones, rigor ously developed and effectively disseminated and implemented, formally eval uated after their introduction and mutually compatible.