Authors

1Loreto García Moyano, 2Oihana Arrazola Alberdi, 3Natalia Barrio Forné, 4Laura Grau Salamero, 5Jon Ander González Garrido

Position

¹Enfermera en el Servicio de Cirugía general, Oncología y Cirugía vascular, Hospi

Contact address

Loreto María García Moyano. C/ Calatayud, 33, esc. 2, 3º D. 22005 Huesca.

Contact email: loretongarcia@hotmail.com

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of the Triage Aid Programme (Web_e-PAT v3.5) at the San Jorge Hospital, Huesca through the admission rate, length of stay in the ER and resource consumption.
Material and methods: Before-after intervention after the implementation of Spanish triage system with the help of software v3.5 Web_e-PAT. We used indirect indicators or proxies of severity as outcome variables:
admissions ratio, length of stay in the emergency room and use of diagnostic tests. For hypothesis testing the Student t test, Mann-Whitney U and chi-square were used.
Results: 2,973 patients were treated in the service in the pre-intervention period (year 2008) and 3,000 in the post-intervention period (year 2009). The average length of stay in the service increased in the second period from 161.78 to 168.40 minutes, as did the hospitalization rate (in 2008, 31.2% and in 2009, 32.6%), although changes were not statistically significant. There was a significant reduction (p <0.027) in the use of electrocardiographic tests.
Conclusions: the implementation of triage aid programme at the Hospital San Jorge has not achieved a significant reduction in all outcome variables studied (only in the requests for electrocardiographic tests), but there were decreases in the use of other diagnostic tests, which
together with the greater advantage of immediate triage which is patient classi­fication upon arrival at the service, make the triage an essential tool both to control management and quality as well as to increase patient
satisfaction.

Keywords:

Emergency room; Spanish Triage System (SET); triageWeb_e-PAT

Versión en Español

Título:

Efectividad del programa de ayuda al triaje (Web_e-PAT v3.5) en el Hospital San Jorge de Huesca