Health & Wellness: What Is Triage?

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What Is Triage?

Daily Bread

How much better to get wisdom than gold, to choose understanding rather than silver!
Proverbs 16:16

Triage – the ER system that saves lives.

Emergency rooms across the country face the most difficult occupational decisions that exist: deciding whose life-threatening situation to address first. To save as many lives as possible, ER staff uses a system that is as old as Napoleon himself: triage.

Both nationally and locally, hospital ERs are becoming more overcrowded due to various factors, including a nationwide decrease in ERs, fewer minor medical options for nonurgent patients and more people moving into rural areas supported by only a few hospitals. As ERs gets busier, it becomes even more vital for health professionals to use a system to screen and categorize patients.

The process sorts the most critical patients from those in less immediate danger. The triage system begins with the evaluation of incoming patients into the ER. A triage nurse asks a series of questions to determine exactly how life threatening the injury or illness is, how much pain patients have, how long the condition has existed and how quickly patients’ health is deteriorating. Even patients who are brought in by ambulance must undergo this process. Paramedics perform similar assessments for patients who are brought in by ambulance.

Once a patient has been admitted by the triage nurse or paramedic, the patient is then classified in one of five categories ranging from most urgent to least urgent. Patients in the most danger will be seen first. Those who don’t have life-threatening illnesses are seen after physicians have treated those with more immediate needs.

Triage began in the battlefield, graduated to disasters and emergency rooms.
Triage was originally devised by French battlefield physician Dominique Jean Larrey to evaluate the wounded soldiers in Napoleon’s army. Patients were previously treated in order of their rank in the army. Larrey’s method saved more lives by focusing on the injury instead of the rank of the injured. Even today, armed service doctors and emergency personnel use triage when facing an overwhelming situation or tragedy.

Saves lives, but makes it impossible to predict how long ER visit will take.
The modern ER faces difficult problems in dealing with overcrowding. The most immediate threat is trying to make sure ER staff saves as many lives as possible. But they must still consider nonurgent patients enduring longer stays in the waiting rooms outside the ER.

Local hospitals have implemented new measures to improve the quality and flow of care to and from the ER. Ultimately, though, patients need to understand the longer they wait, the more lives are being saved in the operating rooms. It’s impossible to know when a car accident or heart attack could put someone’s life in immediate danger and cause you to wait a little longer for an available doctor.

	Black – Expectant (severe burns, severe trauma)
	Red – Immediate (less severe trauma, illness)
	Yellow – Observation (currently stabilized, but needing care)
	Green – Wait (not in immediate need of medical care)
	White – Dismiss (in no need of medical attention)

Published: March 16, 2006

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