The Impact of Emergency Triage Practices on Patient Safety: A Scoping Review Protocol

Abstract

Importance: Emergency triage is prone to error, and quality assurance measures to detect errors are mostly retrospective. Undetected triage practice errors may expose patients to unsafe delays in care, contributing to patient deterioration and harm.

Objective: To map the academic and gray literature on the impact of emergency triage practice errors on patient outcomes.

Evidence review: The scoping review will incorporates reports of patient outcomes related to emergency triage practice errors. Studies reporting patient outcomes of triage (case and cohort), patient experience surveys, and reviews will be included. Studies will be excluded if they omit patient outcomes of triage or report only accuracy, reliability, validity, or clinician opinion. The search will include the academic literature databases of Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health literature; PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science; Australasian Legal Information Institute; British and Irish Legal Information Institute; and the gray literature search engines of Google Advanced, Patient Safety Network, and the Clinical Excellence Commission. Two reviewers will independently screen titles and abstracts, then full-text papers, with a third reviewer resolving any conflicts. Data extraction and summary will be presented in charts, tables, and narrative formats.

Discussion: This protocol details our planned scoping review of the impact of triage practice errors on patient outcomes. Identification of the impact of specific triage practices on patient safety may inform nurses working in and supporting the role of triage.

Keywords: Emergency triage; Mortality; Patient harm; Patient outcomes; Patient safety; Triage delay; Triage error.