AIM This paper presents the findings of one aspect of a larger study aiming to build a substantive grounded theory of the process of initial assessment at triage. BACKGROUND Prioritisation at triage within emergency departments centres primarily on assessing the threat to physiological function of people presenting with health-care problems. This approach presumes that clinical reasoning stra...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the efficacy of an adapted Emergency Triage Assessment and Treatment (ETAT) tool at a children's hospital. DESIGN A two-armed descriptive study. SETTING Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa. METHODS Triage data on 1 309 children from October 2007 and July 2009 were analysed. The number of children in each triage category (red (emergency...

The excessive rate of patients arriving at accident and emergency centres is a major problem facing South African hospitals. Patients are prioritized for medical care through a triage process. Manual systems allow for inconsistency and error. This paper proposes a novel system to automate accident and emergency centre triage and uses this triage score along with an artificial intelligence estim...

The principle ofprioritization by degree ofurgency obviously benefits patients whose condition is critical. This practice should be instilled in all who work in accident and emergency medicine. The Patients' Charter" highlights the importance of triage and states that patients should be seen immediately and their need for treatment assessed. Triage derives from the French word meaning 'to sort'...

BACKGROUND HIV treatment models in Africa are labour intensive and require a high number of skilled staff. In this context, task-shifting is considered a feasible alternative for ART service delivery. In 2006, a lay health cadre of expert patients (EPs) at a tertiary referral HIV clinic in Zomba, Malawi was capacitated. There are few evaluations of EP program efficacy in this setting. Triage is...

We are designing and developing a mobile clinical decision support system, known as MET (Mobile Emergency Triage), for supporting emergency triage of different types of acute pain presentations. MET needs to interact with an existing hospital information system, run on handheld computing devices and be suitable for operation in weak connectivity conditions (with unstable connections between mob...

The prognostic significance of early diagnosis and therapeutic intervention in inflammatory rheumatic diseases has been well documented. However, a shortage of rheumatologists often impedes this approach in clinical practice. Therefore, it is of importance to identify those patients referred for diagnosis who would benefit most from a specialist's care. We applied a telephone-based triage for a...

Background: Wars have laid the foundation on which today's triage is based. Triage is used during disasters, at accident scenes and in the trauma and emergency units of hospitals to sort patients according to the acuity of their injuries/conditions and the type of care they require. Nurses are usually the people who receive the patient first and who assess the priority of the patient's immediat...

Methods Design: Prospective observational study Setting: Pediatric Emergency Department (ED) of a Community Hospital with 10500 ED visits annually. The hospital conducts DNB Pediatrics, MCEM and BSc Accident & Emergency Technology courses. Participants: 3693 children between 0 and 18 years of age who attended ED in a six month period from September 2011 to February 2012 Tools: Nurses on triage ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the safety of nurses and paramedics offering telephone assessment, triage, and advice as an alternative to immediate ambulance dispatch for emergency ambulance service callers classified by lay call takers as presenting with "non-serious" problems (category C calls). DESIGN Data for this study were collected as part of a pragmatic randomised controlled trial reported elsew...