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- Published on: 19 May 2018
- Published on: 19 May 2018Triage in a developing country
Dear Sirs
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We read with interest your article entitled ‘Inter-rater and intrarater reliability of the South African Triage Scale in low-resource settings of Haiti and Afghanistan (1).’
We undertook a study in one of our Accident and Emergency departments which utilised a modified version of the Canadian Triage Acuity Scale (2). Our country is Trinidad and Tobago, in the same geographical region as Haiti. Trinidad, although not classified as a low to middle income country is a developing country. The health expenditure as a percentage of the gross domestic product is 6%.
We appreciated your article and the findings on reliability among nurses about the South African Triage Scale for use in a low to middle income country.
The Accident and Emergency department we studied provides care and treatment to patients with a wide variety of illnesses ranging from motor vehicle accidents and gunshot wounds to presentations such as back pain. Briefly, our study found that those in the immediate category were seen almost immediately. Those in other categories needed to wait and some waited more than 4 hours for a bed once a decision to admit was made. We cited staffing and systematic issues as possible reasons for the delays seen. Our study suffered from not documenting presenting symptoms and signs in order to validate the assigned triage category. The South African Triage Scale is perhaps more realistic in a developing country setting with the green category se...Conflict of Interest:
None declared.