The formation and design of the TRIAGE study - baseline data on 6005 consecutive patients admitted to hospital from the emergency department

Table 1 The five categories of DEPT triage

Rescuscitation	Emergent	Urgent	Non-urgent	Non-urgent
Life threatened	Critical illness	Potentially unstable	Stable	Unaffected
Constant re-evaluation	Re-evaluation every 15 min.	Re-evaluation every 60 min.	Re-evaluation every 180 min.	Re-evaluation every 240 min.
Acute Team	Physician and Nurse	Nurse → physician*	Nurse → Physician*	Nurse or physician

DEPT (Danish Emergency Process) Triage: Each patient is assigned a triage level for each of the two main descriptors: 1) Vital signs and 2) presenting complaint. The nurse performing triage can increase a patients triage level if she believes the patient is more ill than what is determined by DEPT [19]. *Patients are seen by a physician, but the evaluation can be made by a nurse initially

ISSN: 1757-7241