The series was the creation of South African born Tessa Diamond, an ATV continuity writer who was responsible for writing the links for programme announcers, and who had already submitted several series idea's to the stations programme developers. One day she was discussing her despair at another rejection with her literary agent when he suggested that she write a series on hospital life. Tessa mistook his meaning, for what he'd visualised was a factual documentary series, whereas she went away and wrote the outline for a drama. Tessa pieced a story together overnight in her Queensgate flat, which she shared with two other friends and posted it off to ATV programming chief Bill Ward the following day, before going to Yorkshire for her Christmas break. On her return from holiday three days later there was an urgent message waiting for her from ATV. 'Script wanted immediately', it said. "You can't go ahead and write a pilot script about a hospital without doing some research" Tessa later recalled. "So, I quickly called a doctor acquaintance of mine and we got together for dinner and I spent the evening interrogating him about hospital life."

Set in the fictitious surroundings of Oxbridge General Hospital, the series was an instant hit -with one million viewers tuning in to the first episode in February 1957, and running for ten years. In the process it made stars out of the actors and actresses who walked its wards, not least of all Jill Browne, who played pin-up nurse (later Sister) Carole Young. The series also won praise from the British Medical Association for allaying people's fear of hospitals, and in 1962 the then Minister of Health, Enoch Powell, congratulated the show on its 500th episode and commented on the useful job it did in reminding the public of the need for immunization.

Although the series was high in drama it had a very low mortality rate (patient deaths were strictly limited to five per year), concentrating more on the lives of the men and women who staffed the hospital. These included Charles Tingwell as surgeon Alan Dawson and Ray Barrett as Dr. John Nolan. Richard Thorp who would later go on to star in another long running soap, Emmerdale Farm, played Dr. John Rennie, and John (Please Sir! - Upstairs Downstairs) Alderton joined the cast in 1963 as Dr. Richard Moone. (Alderton later married his co-star Jill Browne). Other actors who went on to star in other long running TV serials included Blake's Seven stalwart Paul Darrow and future Crossroads' actress Jane Rossington.

There were, of course, none of the graphically visual blood and guts on show that audiences expect from medical dramas today especially in shows such as Casualty or The Golden Hour. Nevertheless, although sedate by today's standard the series did set a landmark in 1964 and courted a considerable amount of controversy with its portrayal of an interracial relationship between surgeon Louise Mahler (Joan Hooley) and Doctor Giles Farmer (John White) which included the first ever on-screen interracial kiss. Even so, this scene between the two was toned down before transmission because it was considered "a little too suggestive". And when the wife and baby of Dr Anderson died in a flood, tearful viewers protested in droves.

The long list of patients who received treatment within EW10's walls included Ian Hendry, Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney, all of whom went on to bigger and better things. There was a 1958 full-length feature film, Life in Emergency Ward 10, and a brief spin-off series starring Richard Thorp, Call Oxbridge 2000, but in 1967, with ratings beginning to fall, ATV supremo Lew Grade pulled the plug on the hospital's life support. Grade later admitted it was; 'one of the two biggest mistakes of my life.' In 1972 he tried to revive the series as General Hospital, although this had far lesser impact on viewers.