But the EAR, as it is more commonly known, is actually situated within the accident and emergency (A&E) department of King's College Hospital in Denmark Hill, south London.
The room was set up in March this year after the emergency department noticed an increase in the number of young people it was treating. Peter Thompson, consultant and clinical lead for paediatric emergency medicine, says: "When we looked at the figures we found that nearly 10,000 young people used our accident and emergency department last year. Some had self-harmed, others were using drugs and some were the victims of attacks."
But Thompson and some of his colleagues felt teenage patients were not very well catered for within A&E. The children's facilities offered by the department were often too childish for many of the young people and most weren't ready to use adult services.
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