Essential Emergency Package (EEP)

What is the Essential Emergency Package (EEP)?

The Essential Emergency Package, or EEP, is a comprehensive and up-to-date list of essential medicines, supplies and equipment relevant to the district hospital context. If the EEP is being evaluated for a non-district health facility, such as a more robustly-resourced provincial hospital, the EEP includes suggestions of supplies that may be added or removed.

Why use the Essential Emergency Package?

The Essential Emergency Package allows for standardization of inventory needed to effectively and adequately respond to the acute care needs of district hospitals. Emergency care, unlike clinic-based health-care, must be able to swiftly and correctly respond to a large variety of types of illnesses and injury. This need can result in challenges for planners in ensuring a supply chain that allows emergency clinicians and staff to have the tools to help patients who need time-sensitive acute care. The EEP ensures that health care providers have the materials they need to save lives and helps prevent supply stock-outs, inadequate or inappropriate supplies as a barrier to the best possible outcomes for ill or injured patients.

Will the Essential Emergency Package work for me?

The EEP has been extensively field tested in settings in both East and West Africa, with stakeholders from ministries of health, public and private health facilities, medical directors and front-line clinicians. It allows decision-makers to have confidence that emergency centers have the necessary medications, supplies and equipment, without wastage incurred by obtaining unnecessary materials. It has been evaluated in accordance with evolving WHO standards and allows for quality care for patients with a wide variety of medical and traumatic illnesses.

How does the Essential Emergency Package integrate with other elements of the sidHARTe toolkit?

The EEP is a key element of the sidHARTe toolkit and integrates seamlessly with the other elements within it. The training provided in the Acute Care Inservice Course (ACIS) ensures that clinicians know how and when to use the drugs, consumable and durable medical equipment enumerated in the EEP. The Emergency Medical Clinical Guidelines, written in the same format as the World Health Organization’s clinical guidelines, specify the diagnostic and treatment steps for each disease and condition (tailored to the specific context of the country’s healthcare system) and refer to the elements of the EEP in their algorithms. The EEP and the Emergency Services Resource Assessment Tool (ESRAT) function best jointly to allow not only a better understanding of the current state of emergency care but also the development of appropriate interventions to fulfill the supply benchmarks of the EEP.

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