Emergency Severity Index: The Ups and Downs of Triage

Who’s next? (Wikimedia Commons)

Jessica Mason MD and Wendy Chan MD discuss the history and present methods of triage in the May EM:RAP podcast of Annals of Emergency Medicine: Emergency Severity Index.

How do you risk stratify in your emergency department? Do you use a three-step system of emergent, urgent or non-urgent? Or the five-step triage protocol with ESI 1 indicating a critical patient to an ESI 5 indicating nothing serious? Neither provide an ideal system, but what about front-end physician triage, split flow and vertical flow? Update your triage knowledge by listening to the podcast…it might make your day flow smoother.

Larreys Flying Ambulance (National Library of Medicine)

Who Knew? Baron Dominique Jean Larrey is credited with inventing triage during the Napoleonic Wars but did you know he invented the first ambulance? The horse-drawn “flying ambulances” could maneuver quickly across a battlefield delivering injured men to field hospitals.