Emergency Severity Index triage system and implementation experience in a university hospital

Objective: Emergency Severity Index (ESI) is a simple to use, five-level triage instrument that categorizes emergency department patients in four decision points by evaluating both patient acuity and resources. Aim of this study was to introduce the ESI triage system and sharing the implementation experience of it in a university hospital emergency department. Methods: We planned to use ESI triage system in Gulhane Military Medical Academy Department of Emergency Medicine at November 2009. Education materials were provided from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). A two day long case based training program was planned for ESI education. We included 34 emergency nurses to training program in 3 seperate groups. ESI Implementation Handbook used as the primary source for training. Triage algoritm posters and triage games were prepared to make education more interesting. We evaluated the efficiency of training by using two different method: Pre/post evaluation and pre/post test method. Results: Determining the correct triage level was increase from 30% (9.52 +/- 2.53) to 80% (24.88 +/- 3.01) in pre/post test method which include 30 cases and 40% to 76% in pre/post evaluation method which include 10 cases. Conclusions: We concluded that ESI is simple to learn, practical system for emergency triage and two day case based training program was effective to teach it.