Analysis of triage assessment form of emergency department

Abstract

Background: It has been found that among the issues related to triage of emergency department patients by nurses, the number of patients with green tag has been increased year by year. It accounts for the majority of the total emergency care services, which causes the increased load on the services and interfere with the quality of service to the critical patients. For our country, for our country, the cost of patients with yellow label still occupies a large share of the total cost related emergency department. Therefore, there is a need to study the factors affect the triage of emergency department patients. Aim: This research aims to determine the color labels of emergency patients based on their triage, the length of time for emergency care services and the cost for treatment and identify the factors influencing them. Materials and Methods: The research was carried out using a retrospective study design. The research data was sampled on 269 triage sheets of the emergecy department patients at the Sukhbaatar district Medical Center and Chingeltei district Hospital. The results were producted using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation and multiple regression analysis. Results: The average age of the participants was 44.8±14.81, and the majority of them, 52.4% (141), were women. According to the triage sheets of the emergency department patients, 56.1% (151) of patients were tagged with yellow and 40.1% (108) were green. The patients triage and age have a weak negative correlation (r=-0.180, p=0.027), however the patient triage and gender have a weak positive correlation (r=0.135, p=0.02); and it has a moderate positive correlation with education level (r=0.352, p=0.001). In other words, the patient`s age, gender and education level have the correlations of (R2=.029, P=0.003), (R2=.014, P=0.02) and (R2=.364, P=0.0001), respectively, to the patient triage. Conclusions: 1. 96.2% (259) of all patients were triaged with green and yellow tags, which were influenced by demographic variables such as their age, gender and education level. 2. Thus, it has been concluded that it is essential to provide the citizens with health education, which will enable to reduce the overload of emergency care services and the costs of treatment, and to provide the quality of care to the critical patients.