OBJECTIVE To compare the workloads of general practitioners and nurses and costs of patient care for nurse telephone triage and standard management of requests for same day appointments in routine primary care. DESIGN Multiple interrupted time series using sequential introduction of experimental triage system in different sites with repeated measures taken one week in every month for 12 month...

CONTEXT The main objectives of triage are securing patient safety during the process of emergency diagnosis and treatment, and reduction of waiting time for medical services and transport. To date, there is no triage system for nerve agent victims. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION This systematic review proposes a new triage system for patients exposed to nerve agents. Information regarding clinical sign...

BACKGROUND Patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) currently face inacceptable delays in initial treatment, and long, costly hospital stays due to suboptimal initial triage and site-of-care decisions. Accurate ED triage should focus not only on initial treatment priority, but also on prediction of medical risk and nursing needs to improve site-of-care decisions and to simplify earl...

BACKGROUND Previous reports of lower triage acuity scores and longer Emergency Department (ED) wait times for African Americans compared to Caucasians had insufficient information to determine if this was due to bias or appropriately based on medical history and clinical presentation. OBJECTIVE (1) Determine if African Americans are assigned lower triage acuity scores (TAS) after adjusting fo...

Abstract Background Triage, identifying patients with critical and time-sensitive disorders, is an integrated process in general emergency medicine. Obstetric triage more specialised, requiring assessment of both woman, fetus labour status. Failure to identify severely ill obstetric has repeatedly led maternal morbidity mortality. Reliable systems, adapted as well local conditions, are thus ess...

OBJECTIVES This article explores the potential of discrete event simulation (DES) methods to advance system-level investigation of emergency department (ED) operations. To this end, the authors describe the development and operation of Emergency Department SIMulation (EDSIM), a new platform for computer simulation of ED activity at a Level 1 trauma center. The authors also demonstrate one poten...

Background The Emergency Department (ED) at Hillerød Hospital uses a five-level triage system inspired by the Swedish ADAptiv Process Triage (ADAPT). The triage categories are red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Patients classified as red need immediate treatment whereas blue patients are non-urgent and not admitted to hospital. The patient is assigned a triage category based on both vital sig...

BACKGROUND In public healthcare facilities, where the patient numbers and the available resources are often disproportionate, triage is used to prioritise when patients are seen. Patients may not understand the triage process and have strong views on how to improve their experience. AIM This study explored the views of patients who had undergone triage in the emergency centre of a primary car...