Responsibility-Evading Performance: The Experiences of Healthcare Staff about Triage in Emergency Departments: A Qualitative Study

Correct triage is one of the most important issues in delivering proper healthcare in the emergency department. Despite the availability of various triage guidelines, triage is not still appropriately implemented. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the role of different underlying factors in triaging emergency patients through a qualitative approach. This study was conducted by conventional content analysis. For this purpose, 30 interviews were conducted with 25 participants. The participants included triage nurses, emergency general physicians, emergency medicine specialists, and expert managers at different position rankings in hospitals and educational and administrative centers in Yazd, selected by purposeful sampling. Data were collected through in‑depth and unstructured interviews from April 2017 to January 2018, and then analyzed by inductive content analysis. Four categories of profit triage, exhibitive triage, enigmatic, and tentative performance triage were drawn from the data, collectively comprising the main theme of responsibility‑evading performance. The dominant approach to the triage in the emergency departments in a central city of Iran is responsibility evasion; however, the triage is performed tentatively, especially in critical cases. To achieve a better implementation of triage, consideration of the underlying factors and prevention of their involvement in triage decision‑making is necessary.