Healers encounter many different types of wizarding afflictions, as you all know from your previous studies. So, faced with a waiting room full of sick and injured witches and wizards, how does the busy healer decide who comes first?

We know that St. Mungo's has different departments for different types of accidents and illnesses. Patients are filtered through to the appropriate department from reception, but sometimes not straight away. We have seen healers in the reception area of the hospital asking patients questions and filling in forms - this is 'triage'; the assessment of the urgency of a patient's problem.

What is likely to be on these forms? Things of importance when deciding how urgently someone needs treatment are:

How long the problem has been present - if someone has had dragon pox for three weeks, they may be poorly and tired from not eating or drinking very much, but are unlikely to become very seriously ill from it, whereas a small child brought in with the same condition who has had it only for a few hours, and has a very high temperature and lots of spots might well become very ill indeed and would be seen as more of an emergency.

How serious or life-threatening the problem is - someone with twitchy ears should be reasonable about waiting to be seen after someone with a werewolf bite, for example.

How the patient feels - a very distressed patient will benefit from being seen sooner than someone else with the same problem who is calm.

The potential for further harm to the patient - an ongoing jinx or curse will need to be halted before it can further damage your patient. It is also easier to, say, treat someone with teeth down to their elbows than down to their knees.

The level of detail that can be provided about the problem - if it is known that a bite was caused by a kneazle rather than a baby dragon, a little more time could be taken before the patient is seen. If it is not known exactly what happened, it is best to err on the side of caution and treat the problem as urgent.