INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
In November 2001, the then Department of Health and Aged Care funded the development of a resource book for nurse educators to promote the consistent application of the Australasian Triage Scale( ATS).
This resource is founded on the original fieldwork of Whitby, Leraci, Johnson and Mohsin( 1997) that described the clinical features used by Triage Nurses to assess urgency in relation to patient presentations to emergency departments. The ATS( formerly known as the National Triage Scale) has been shown to be both a reliable and valid instrument for sorting patients according to their care requirements in order to optimise clinical outcomes in emergency departments( FitzGerald 1989; Whitby, Leraci S et al. 1997).
In the past decade, a number of researchers have documented acceptable levels of inter-rater reliability among Triage Nurses using the ATS and confirmed its utility in practice( FitzGerald 1989; Jelinek 1996; Dilley 1998; Whitby, et al. 1997). Throughout Australia, triage standards regarding time-to-treatment and performance thresholds are now uniformly employed to quantify both the quality of emergency care and to measure emergency department casemix( FitzGerald 2000).
VII
Enhancing the consistency of the application of the ATS is a shared goal for emergency nursing, the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine( ACEM) and the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing.
The first edition of the Emergency Triage Education Kit( ETEK) was published in April 2002 as the Triage Education Resource Book( TERB). This revised edition is the result of a collaborative effort between the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, the Australian College of Emergency Nursing, the College of Emergency Nursing Australasia and the Council of Remote Area Nurses of Australia.
Emergency care is recognised as a nursing specialty of the National Specialisation Framework for Nursing and Midwifery( 2006). Additionally, an outcome of the National Health Workforce Strategic Framework( 2004) is to build a suitably trained, competent and sustainable health workforce. To underpin this, a single national accreditation scheme for health education and training is to be put in place by 1 July 2008. The Department believes the content of this revised education kit will provide valuable input to the development of emergency triage training materials to support the national accreditation scheme for the emergency care nursing speciality.
Department of Health and Ageing – Emergency Triage Education Kit