Triage assessment of registered nurses in the emergency department

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The accuracy of the triage is calculated when the nurse agrees to categorize the specialist and classify both patients at the same triage level. Higher precision in triage represents better quality to emergency services.

Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of triage by nurses in the Emergency Department.

Method and material: this study is a systematic review of the literature. The bibliography was searced through the Pubmed database. The keywords used are: nurses, triage, accurary, consistency, agreement, emergency nurse, triage nurse, doctor, triage skills. This systematic review included studies written in the English language ,published over the last five years, are original articles. Totally, 12 were selected.

Results: Most studies evaluated only nurses triage skills, while others compared nurses triage skills   with those of other health care physicians and some investigated the factors responsible for nurses triage skills. The nurses had a good knowledge and sufficient triage ability for moderate and light patients, but lack skills for critical ill patients.

Conclusions: The ability and theoretical knowledge of nurses for triage were found to be at a good level. The effectiveness of triage by nurses was comparable to that of physicians. Combined with appropriate training, nurses can take on the difficult task of triage in the Emergency Department of the hospitals.

Keywords: Screening, nurses, efficacy, knowledge, skills