Introduction: To achieve the most suitable
treatment, triage is essential for the first clinical evaluation and
classifying all patients referring to the emergency department. Accurate and
rapid triage of patients is the key to a successful performance of emergency
departments. This study aimed to determine prevalence of miss triage and outcomes under
triage of patients inemergency
department.
Materials and Methods: In this descriptive study, a
total of 300 files were randomly selected among patients referred to the
emergency department of the hospitals that are educationally related to the Shahid Beheshti
University of Medical Sciences where "Emergency Severity Index" (ESI) was
actively implemented.
Data was collected by demographics information and triage form based on triage
algorithm "Emergency Severity Index". To determine the validity, face
validity and reliability of the ESI was measured by inter-rater observation (0.85).Data were
analyzed by SPSS/17.
Findings: The under triage of 23.7% and over
triage of 11.7% were assessed in the research. The largest amount of under
triage was at the ESI level 3. Dying risk of under triage (with 95%) was 3.2
times higher than accurate triage and over triage. In addition, there was no
meaningful statistical difference for the average period of hospitalization(P=0.77),duration of
hospitalization at the emergency department (P=0.50) and waiting time for the
initial examination (P=0.39)by the emergency
physician in triage group comparing the under triage group.
Conclusion: Findings showed that the degree of miss
triage is higher than the acceptable threshold and doing an accurate triage or
along with miss triage doesn’t have any impacts on the timing indicators.
Kamrani F, Ghaemipour F, Nikravan M, Alavi Majd H. Prevalence of miss triage and outcomes under triage of patients in emergency department. JHPM 2013; 2 (3) :17-23 URL: http://jhpm.ir/article-1-117-en.html