CONTROVERSIES IN EMERGENCY CARE

Debate

Don’t throw triage out with the bathwater

J Windle¹, K Mackway-Jones²

¹ Department of Emergency Medicine, Hope Hospital, Salford/Salford University, UK
² Department of Emergency Medicine, Manchester Royal Infirmary, UK

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Jill Windle, Department of Emergency Medicine, Hope Hospital, Stott Lane, Salford M6 8HN, UK;
jill.windle@srht.nhs.uk

Keywords: See and Treat; triage

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The concept of See and Treat has been heralded as something new and innovative that will ease the plight of emergency departments throughout England. However, anyone who has been in emergency care over the past 20 years will recognise this process as the norm during the early 1980s. Indeed triage was introduced to clinically risk manage this system of first come first serve and to re-direct the focus of scarce nursing and medical staff away from the most minor of presentations. For those who do remember these times there must have been a strong sense of déjà vu during their See and Treat workshop.

The Department of Health workshops focused on a series of exemplar hospitals who have introduced See and Treat. It is of note that they all appear to have a number of similarities, namely:

• streaming for major and minor patients did not exist before introducing See . . . [Full text of this article]

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