Challenges of Implementing Correct Triage: A Systematic Review Study

Proper triage of patients to receive medical services can manage their referral to medical centers, reduce mortality, and increase the quality of services provided. Due to the importance of this issue, some of the triage challenges were reviewed and described here.

In the present systematic review study, to extract related studies, keywords Triage, Challenge, Pre-Hospital Emergency, and Hospital-Emergency were searched in both Persian and English in domestic and foreign databases including Pubmed, Scopus, Science Direct, SID, Magiran from 2011 to August 2021. Twenty articles were included in the study based on inclusion criteria.

Out of 6080 retrieved articles, 20 articles were reviewed. In the analysis, seven categories in the triage field challenges around the world were obtained, including 1- Incidence of miss triage and wastage of valuable emergency resources, 2- Insufficient knowledge about Existing types of triage algorithms, 3- Multiplicity of triage algorithms, creation of new algorithms and their unfamiliarity for health care personnel 4- Ethical problems for triage users 5- Lack of computer tools and artificial intelligence or their inefficiency 6- Distance between knowledge and practice of Healthcare personnel, and 7. Lack of codified simulated training courses.

There are several challenges to performing triage in pre-hospital and hospital emergencies. Given the devastating effects of these challenges on patient service delivery, appropriate actions need to be taken by decision-makers to address them.