engleski

Efficiency of triage in the emergency department of an urban academic clinical hospital–a retrospective study

This is a retrospective study using a hospital electronic database incorporating a total of 82, 666 patients, from March 1st, 2015 to February 28th, 2017, who underwent triage in an urban, academic clinical hospital emergency department (ED) and were treated in the Internal Medicine Emergency Department (IMED) and the Surgery Emergency Department (SED). The primary outcomes were the distribution of patients in triage categories, performance indicators and length of stay (LOS) in the ED. The percentage of patients assessed and treated within the recommended timelines for Australasian Triage Score (ATS) Categories 1, 4 and 5 were within the recommended limits. In ATS Category 2, the IMED achieved a 59.99% efficiency rate and the SED a slightly higher rate of 62.6% whilst an ideal target would be 80%. Similarly, in ATS Category 3 patients, the IMED only achieved an adherence of 66.95% and the SED 65.67% as opposed to the 75% performance threshold. Overall, on a monthly basis, in the IMED, 1806.96 patients were assessed and treated ; their average length of stay (LOS) was 4 hours and 57 minutes. In comparison, in the SED, 1719.5 patients were assessed monthly, with an average LOS of 2 hours and 40 minutes. Considering our results, we conclude that extra staff and resources should be deployed in order to achieve better performance indicators in the second and third ATS Categories and to decrease the LOS in the ED in order to ameliorate the quality of care and patient access.

efficiency, organizational, emergency service, hospital/organization & administration, length of stay/statistics & numerical data, patient admission/statistics & numerical data, time factors, triage/statistics & numerical data, croatia

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