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The History of Triage: Development in the Military and Use in Civilian Medicine Today

This is a 5 page paper discussing the history of triage in medicine and its use in the military and civilian health care. Triage, a medical term to mean a sorting or classification of patients based on their levels of medical urgency was first developed as a military term and used in wartime. The French used “triage” to decide who would be taken from the battlefields to be treated and who would be left behind. Soon afterward, from World War II until present day, triage was not only used in Army field hospitals but is also now used in emergency departments to classify the large number of patients who enter each day. Nurses have been involved in the triage process from the beginning and recently the nursing associations have broadened the original three level triage classifications of emergent, urgent and non-urgent, to one of a four level priority system in the United States and one of five level priorities in Australia, Canada and Great Britain. Regardless of the number of levels, triage has become an important and efficient system to evaluate a patient’s urgency as well as analyze the effectiveness of the health care given in emergency departments. Bibliography lists 5 sources.

File: D0_TJtriag1.rtf

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