Prevalence of miss triage and outcomes under triage of patients in emergency department

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 in emergency department. 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. 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. 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.