A quality improvement study of the emergency centre triage in a tertiary teaching hospital in northern Ethiopia.

Introduction: An effective emergency triage system should prioritize both trauma and non-trauma patients according to level of acuity, while also addressing local disease burden and resource availability. In March 2012, an adapted version of the South African Triage Scale was introduced in the emergency centre (EC) of Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital in northern Ethiopia.

Methods: This quality improvement study was conducted to evaluate the implementation of nurse-led emergency triage in a large Ethiopian teaching hospital using the Donabedian model. A 45% random sample was selected from all adult emergency patients during the study period, May 10th to May 25th 2015. Patient charts were collected and retrospectively reviewed. Presence and proper completion of the triage form were appraised. Triage level was abstracted and compared with patient outcome (dichotomized as "admitted to hospital or died" and "discharged alive from emergency centre") to quantify over- and under-triage triage.

Results: From 251 randomly selected patients, 107 (42.6%) charts were retrieved. From these, only 45/107 (42.1%) contained the triage form filled within the chart. None of the triage forms were filled out completely. From 13 (28.9%) admitted or deceased patients, the under-triage rate was 30.7% and from 32 (71.1%) patients discharged alive from the EC the over-triage rate was 21.9%.

Discussion: The under-triage rate observed in this study exceeds the recommended threshold of 5% and is a serious patient safety concern. However, under-triage may have been magnified by irregularities in the hospital admission process. Haphazard medical record handling, poor documentation, erroneous triage decisions, and poor rapport between nurses and physicians were the main process-related challenges that must be addressed through intensive training and improved human resource management approaches to enhance the quality of triage in the emergency centre.