Abstract:

The emergency department (ED), an area of complex interactions with multiple providers involved in numerous processes, representes a substantial business entity in any hospital, accounting for no less than 40%, and often up to 70% of the total hospital admissions.(6). The success of the ED requires effective leadership and management to coordinate the multiple processes involved not only in the simplest aspects of clinical care, but especially in key processess like marketing and communication. Peter Drucker  stated that “Marketing is so basic that it cannot be considered a separate function. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of the client (patient for healthcare organisations).”

Marketing is a fundamental organizational process capable of guiding the entire activity on an upward trend, generating actions in the spirit of the mission and purpose of the organization. One of the central goals of this paper is to ensure that the role of marketing process within the  ED leadership and management is crucial in meeting both: medical organization's targets as a seller and the patient as a buyer. Emergency medicine has depended on a body of knowledge that comprises effective ED management and leadership, marketing and communication. This paper aims to highlight the role of marketing its responsibility to identify and easily meet the objectives of the parties involved in this process, including improve the image of the medical brand, along with promoting a consistent perception of quality of health care, staff professionalism, certain values or subjective attributes.