Evaluation of Nurse-Led Triage in the Emergency Department: A Retrospective Observational Study.
Dolores Selva-Medrano, Jose Alberto Laredo-Aguilera, Víctor Serrano-Fernández and 7 others
PMID 41933431WHAT IT FOUND
Nurse-led triage in a Spanish emergency department showed most patients were low or moderate urgency.
While higher acuity patients got seen faster, only 23.8% of the most urgent met target time-to-care benchmarks, likely because immediate care took priority over electronic documentation.
Key findings
01The majority of patients were triaged to low and moderate urgency levels, with Level IV being the most common category.
02Compliance with time-to-care targets was significantly lower for the highest urgency patients compared to lower acuity groups.
03Re-evaluation in the emergency department was associated with older age, male sex, lower oxygen saturation, and longer length of stay.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The observational design means no causal inferences can be drawn. The study was conducted at a single centre, so findings may not generalise to other emergency department settings. Important contextual factors like ED crowding, staffing levels, and workflow issues were not available in the dataset and could have influenced the time-to-care results. Time-to-care was measured by the time of medical record opening, which may overestimate delays if clinicians provided immediate care before documenting.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest and report no funding.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the low compliance with time-to-care targets in Levels I and II as evidence that nurse-led triage failed to prioritise the sickest patients. The authors suggest this discrepancy likely reflects a mismatch between immediate clinical intervention and the slower process of electronic documentation, rather than a delay in actual care delivery.