The Emergency Nurses Association is the professional organisation for emergency nurses. It was founded in 1970 as the Emergency Department Nurses Association, took its present name in 1985, and reports about 40,000 members worldwide.
The courses
Its most visible products are two courses that function as near-standard employment requirements in American emergency departments.
The Trauma Nursing Core Course teaches a systematic approach to assessing and resuscitating the injured patient, and is widely required or expected for emergency and trauma nursing posts.
The Emergency Nursing Pediatric Course, first introduced in 1993 and now in its seventh edition, covers assessment and intervention for children, a population where emergency departments perform least consistently and where nurses report the least confidence.
Both are course completions rather than certifications, which is a distinction employers themselves often blur in job advertisements.
Certification is separate
The credential for emergency nursing, and the related credentials for paediatric emergency, trauma, flight and transport nursing, are awarded by a separate certification board rather than by the association. As elsewhere in nursing, the membership organisation and the certifying body were deliberately separated. See nursing specialties.
Standards and advocacy
The association publishes practice standards and position statements for emergency care, and its policy work concentrates on two subjects that dominate the specialty.
The first is violence. Emergency departments are where most assaults on nurses happen, and the association has campaigned for prevention programmes, for security response standards and for treating assault on a nurse as a criminal matter. See workplace violence in nursing.
The second is boarding and crowding, where admitted patients are held in the emergency department for want of an inpatient bed, which the association treats as a patient safety failure rather than a throughput inconvenience.
Both connect to staffing. Emergency nursing carries the second-highest turnover rate of any specialty at 20.7 percent, and even at 70 days is the fastest emergency post to fill. See nurse turnover and retention.
Related
- Nursing organizations
- Workplace violence in nursing
- Nurse turnover and retention
- Nursing specialties
- Nurse staffing and patient outcomes
Sources
- About ENA. Emergency Nurses Association, for the founding, renaming and membership. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ENA launches Emergency Nursing Pediatric Course, 7th edition. Emergency Nurses Association, for the course history. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Board of Certification for Emergency Nursing. BCEN, for the certifications awarded outside the association. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report. NSI Nursing Solutions, 2026 edition, for specialty turnover and time to fill. Accessed September 9, 2026.