Clinical decisions using the National Triage Scale: how important is postgraduate education? Considine, Julie, Ung, Lerma and Thomas, Shane 2001, Clinical decisions using the National Triage Scale: how important is postgraduate education?, Accident and emergency nursing, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 101-108, doi: 10.1054/aaen.2000.0209. Attached Files Name Description MIMEType Size Downloads Title Clinical decisions using the National Triage Scale: how important is postgraduate education? Author(s) Considine, Julie orcid.org/0000-0003-3801-2456 Ung, Lerma Thomas, Shane Journal name Accident and emergency nursing Volume number 9 Issue number 2 Start page 101 End page 108 Publisher Churchill Livingstone Place of publication Edinburgh, Scotland Publication date 2001-04 ISSN 0965-2302 Summary Triage is the formal nursing assessment of all patients who present to an Emergency Department (ED). The National Triage Scale (NTS) is used in most Australian EDs. Triage decision making involves the allocation of every patient presenting to an ED to one of the five NTS categories. The NTS directly relates a triage category to illness or injury severity and need for emergency care. Triage nurses’ decisions not only have the potential to impact on the health outcomes of ED patients, they are also used, in part, to evaluate ED performance and allocate components of ED funding. This study was a correlational study that used survey methods. Triage decisions were classified as ‘expected triage’, ‘overtriage’ or ‘undertriage’ decisions. Participant’s qualifications were allocated to five categories: ‘nil’; ‘emergency nursing’; ‘critical care nursing’; ‘midwifery’; and ‘tertiary’ qualifications. There was no correlation between triage decisions and length of experience in emergency nursing or triage. ‘Expected triage’ decisions were more common when the predicted triage category was Category 3 (P< 0.001) and ‘overtriage’ decisions were less common when the predicted triage category was Category 2 (P< 0.0010). The frequency of ‘undertriage’ decisions decreased significantly when the predicted triage category was Category 3 (P< 0.001) or Category 4 (P< 0.001). There was no correlation between triage decisions and qualifications in the ‘nil’, ‘emergency nursing’ or ‘critical care nursing’ categories. A midwifery qualification demonstrated a positive correlation with ‘expected triage’ decisions (P = 0.048) and a negative correlation with ‘undertriage’ decisions (P = 0.012). There was also a positive correlation between a tertiary qualification and ‘expected triage’ decisions (P = 0.012). Language eng DOI 10.1054/aaen.2000.0209 Field of Research 111003 Clinical Nursing: Secondary (Acute Care) HERDC Research category C1.1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal Copyright notice ©2001, Harcourt Publishers Ltd Persistent URL http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30004253 Document type: Journal Article Collections: Faculty of Health School of Nursing and Midwifery Centre for Quality and Patient Safety Research Related Links Link Description Connect to published version Go to link with your DU access privileges     Unless expressly stated otherwise, the copyright for items in DRO is owned by the author, with all rights reserved. Versions Version Filter Type Fri, 06 Feb 2009, 15:34:47 EST Fri, 09 Apr 2010, 15:11:35 EST Tue, 04 Jun 2013, 11:16:30 EST Mon, 16 Jun 2014, 07:42:51 EST Fri, 10 Oct 2014, 08:17:47 EST Filtered Full Citation counts:   Cited 0 times in TR Web of Science Cited 29 times in Scopus Search Google Scholar Access Statistics: 1249 Abstract Views, 0 File Downloads  -  Detailed Statistics Created: Mon, 07 Jul 2008, 09:16:15 EST