Telefonische triage door de Noodcentrale 112 versus fysieke triage op de spoedgevallendienst: een vergelijking

Abstract

Telephone triage by the 112 emergency center versus physical triage at the emergency department: a comparison Operators of the 112 emergency center (EC 112) use medical protocols to convert a request for help into a severity level and thus a specific resource. At the emergency department (ED), a physical triage is performed by the triage nurse. The primary goal was to compare the severity level assigned by EC 112 with the ED triage score. The secondary goal was to compare the activated medical protocol by EC 112 with the main complaint registered by the triage nurse. A retrospective cohort study was performed with data collected from the database of the EC 112 Flemish Brabant (Belgium) of all adult patients (≥ 18 years) referred to the ED of the University Hospital Leuven via the mobile urgency group (MUG), the paramedical intervention team (PIT) or the ambulance in 2019. A matched severity level determined by EC 112 was compared to an a priori matched emergency triage score. For the 5,519 included patients, the severity level assigned by EC 112 for the MUG, PIT and ambulance corresponded in respectively 91.5%, 86.7% and 53.9% of the cases with the severity level according to the ED triage score. For the MUG, PIT and ambulance, the activated medical protocol corresponded in respectively 60.9%, 62.1% and 58.8% of the cases with the main complaint registered by the triage nurse. This study showed a high degree of correspondence between the resources MUG and PIT sent out by the operators of EC 112 and the ED triage score. A higher PIT deployment may lead to time and efficiency gains.