People’s Understanding on Severity Triage Level of Emergency Illness before Reaching the Hospital: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Objectives: To evaluate people’s understanding on prehospital triage for the level of severity of emergency illness in terms of interrater agreement compared with the Thai criteria-based dispatch, and to assess the factors associated with people’s understanding. Study design: A cross-sectional survey of Chiang Mai people’s perception on responses and management by call takers and dispatchers at the call center of the emergency medical service. Methods: The survey asked people’s perceived priorities by randomly selecting 4 out of 24 pre-set emergency scenarios of the Thai criteria-based dispatch triage cases. The questionnaire also asked respondent’s characteristics, such as, education, previous experience on emergency medical care, and related perceptional factors. Apart from descriptive statistics, Cohen’s kappa coefficient to compare the agreement and logistic regression to explore associated factors with agreement were analyzed. Results: A total of 102 participants responded to the survey, 62.7% were female, median age was 25 years old (IQR = 21-37). Most of them were bachelor’s degree holders, a 38.2% agreement between people’s perceived priority and the Thai criteria-based dispatch was found (k = 0.175, p < 0.005), with 42.9% under triage and 18.9% over triage. The percentage of agreement was higher for non-urgency (49.5%), and semi urgency (40.8%), but lower for urgency (33.0%) and emergency scenarios (29.0%). No factors associated with the agreement of people’s perceived priority and the pre­hospital triage were found. Conclusions: People’s perceived priority did not match with the actual triage category, and no people’s characteristics associated with prehospital triage agreement were established.