Background: Emergency departments are in many aspects considered stressful and overcrowded environments where patients must wait a long time before receiving care. At the same time, every patient is an individual with specific needs. These conditions make the caregivers mission to offer safe, person-centered and empathetic care a challenge, since the pressure is high to care for many patients in short time. It is important to understand the patients’ experiences to further develop the emergency care in the future.

Aim: This study aims to describe patients’ experience of receiving care at the emergency department.

Method: A literature-based method with qualitative analyze was used. Seven articles were found by systematically searching through databases Cinahl and PubMed. One article was found by unsystematically searching through PubMed.

Results: According to patients, person-centered care and empathetic communication were factors that made the experience feel empowering and caring. When the caring relationship was made a priority, patients left feeling treated with kindness and dignity. Being ignored and treated like an object were factors contributing to patients feeling mistreated and powerless.

Conclusion: Patients who experienced a respectful and balanced relationship with the caregivers felt empowered and well-treated. Patients, especially those more vulnerable, seemed to be in higher risk of being treated badly with disrespectful communication and dehumanization. Although many different patient experiences were described, the perspective of fragile elderly patients would have been desirable, since those are the patients that may visit the emergency department most frequently.