Triage of patients for emergency medical team based on pre-hospital observations

Background Critically ill patients are likely to benefit from being received by a predefined multidisciplinary team providing a structured and well qualified initial examination and immediate treatment of life-threatening conditions. At Viborg Hospital all critically ill non-trauma adult patients have been received by an emergency medical team (EMT) since January 1st 2012. The EMT is a preformed multidisciplinary team led by senior registrars or consultants from the Department of internal medicine and the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care. To identify those patients that should be received by EMT and ensure optimal resource utilization a triage system is necessary. Based on the triage system ADAPT, we have developed a system where data from the Emergency Medical Services form the basis for the triage. To our knowledge, no other Danish study have evaluated the use of pre-hospital data for the triage of unselected critically ill non-trauma patients. We aimed at evaluating the present triage model.