What is triage and why is it done?

To decide the order of treatment of patients
Índice Show

Why is triage important?
How can online consultations help GP practices triage patients?
Triage can also help patients get to the right care more quickly
What about patients who can’t use online consultations?
Understand how your GP practice works
Use our NHS GP finder to start an eConsult

Triage: Definition from Oxford Languages

Every day, GP practices receive requests for help or advice through patients calling in, walking in, and now also online via online consultations. For each patient request, the practice needs to work out:

Why they have sought help from their GP
What kind of help the patient needs
How quickly the patient needs help
Who is the best person to help this patient
Where and when the patient should be seen

The answers to these questions help the practice to sort patients based on their needs. This process is called triage. Triaging is essential when you may be dealing with hundreds of patients a day, all with different needs, requests and health backgrounds.

Why is triage important?

When we feel unwell we often want reassurance and advice about our symptoms, but might not know exactly what is wrong with us or how to treat it. Not every request can be dealt with by a GP practice, not every condition is right to be seen at A&E, and Dr Google (or the internet) will often lead you to think you have something you do not. Medical professionals spend years training and are the experts when it comes to making sure patients get the right care.

Regardless of whether you look online first, there are times when you know you need help from a medical professional, such as a doctor or pharmacist. You then have to decide where to go and which healthcare professional is right for you. As a patient, how are you to know? Do you go to your GP, pharmacist, out of hours service or an A&E department? The list goes on.

When you finally decide which healthcare service you think you need, you explain why you are there and are asked about how you are feeling. You are then given care or you might be told a different healthcare professional is best placed to help you.

With large numbers of patients to look after (some GP practices have over 40,000 patients registered at them), it is essential to triage and sort each patient to the right type of care. It might seem convenient to book an appointment with a GP for when you have time, but if an appointment is not the right care for you, then it is not a good use of your or the doctor’s time.

How can online consultations help GP practices triage patients?

Online consultations allow a patient to submit their request whenever they need to. There is no need to wait in a phone queue, travel to the practice or wait until the practice is open. The request will be sent to the practice, with answers that may suggest something serious highlighted. The information provided allows the practice to triage each patient. This also means the right person can help you, based on the nature of your request. For example, the administrative team responds to admin requests, nurses, GPs and other clinicians respond to patients appropriate for the type of care or treatment they need.

Patients can do all of this from home, on their computer, phone or tablet. Rather than having to guess which healthcare option would be right for them, they can go online, submit an eConsult and wait for a clinician to tell them.

eConsult has ‘red-flagging’ built-in. If you answer questions that suggest your condition is more critical than can be seen at a GP practice, you will be stopped and advised to seek more critical care.

Triage can also help patients get to the right care more quickly

As mentioned above, there are a multitude of different healthcare options available to patients. Knowing which one you should go to can be difficult, especially when you are feeling unwell. By completing an online triage, through a platform like eConsult, you can wait at home or continue to go about your day, safe in the knowledge a trained healthcare professional is reviewing your submission and will let you know what care you need.

What about patients who can’t use online consultations?

There will always be patients who can’t use online consultations for whatever reason. Submitting an online consultation is not the only way to contact a GP practice and a practice still has to triage phone requests and walk-in requests. However, if more patients go online to contact their GP practice, it will mean more traditional forms (such as telephone or walk-in) will be reserved for patients who don’t have online access.

You can compare online consultations at your doctors to banking. Many people now use online banking, but there are still branches open for those who cannot use a banking app on their mobile phones or don’t have online access.

Understand how your GP practice works

It’s important to understand how a GP practice works. As a patient, you are one of many the practice looks after and the doctors have to prioritise who should be seen first. Due to the detailed history taken by eConsult, your practice has all the information they need to ‘triage’ you without you having to phone up the practice or come in. eConsult is now available in over 3,000 NHS GP practices throughout the UK.

Next time you need to contact your GP, why not try an online eConsultation first?

Use our NHS GP finder to start an eConsult

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Triage is a form of process management that fast tracks patient care in hospitals and healthcare settings. It also is used by companies needing faster workflows for projects under tight deadlines.

Triage is a management protocol that structures the incoming workflow by priority so that the most critical work is attended to first.
The practice is most often used in hospitals and other healthcare settings, becoming particularly important in response to disasters, battlefields or other emergencies.
Triage also has applications in non-healthcare businesses by creating a structure for prioritizing projects, updates, publications, and other timely corporate needs.
Triage helps companies by enabling them to attend to emergencies quickly, but it also poses risks, as it tends to involve the elimination of certain time-consuming steps that are normally part of the workflow.

Triage refers to the practice of dividing incoming work or customers by priority level so the highest priorities are handled first. Triage is especially important in emergency medical situations such as those seen on the battlefield or following catastrophic civilian accidents. Health care workers use medical triage when the number of incoming patients exceeds the normal capacity of the medical center or emergency room. All medical personnel learn triage procedures so that patients with the most serious conditions receive attention first.

Process management is an important part of project management within companies, especially those releasing several products simultaneously. For example, development teams tasked with upgrading software releases now use Agile sprints where the improvements are continuously made and released to customers on rapid timelines. Within the same software company, serious glitches will be discovered by an important customer requiring a fast response to save the business. The software engineers work in a triage manner to prioritize the most important issues as they work through the list of issues.

Most triage process management situations originate with customers, patients or external deadline pressures. For example, book publishers release most of their new titles on a set editorial and production schedule of one year or more, which allows everyone to plan ahead for the timed publication. Publishers also have a system where they can put a project on a fast track schedule through a specialized editorial and marketing triage team. This is most often done with an important political book or celebrity biography where the publisher wants to be first to market.

Triage is most effective when used on an as-needed basis—in response to emergencies or time-sensitive problems—not as the normal, day-to-day protocol for running a hospital or other business.

A risk for medical and business management teams occurs when triage processes start to become the norm. There are temptations once a team proves it can fast track a project to think that all projects can be handled this way. When teams attempt this approach across multiple projects, the end result is almost always a decline in quality and service. Triage by definition must eliminate some of the time-consuming steps seen in best practices processes. For example, a software development team releasing a new product might allocate less quality control hours than normal.

When everything becomes a rush project, staff may become overburdened and demoralized working long hours under constant deadline pressures. This, in turn, leads to mistakes that a normal process would catch. Effective process management starts at the top and requires sensitivity in determining which projects truly need to be fast-tracked and which can run through normal processes. If more and more projects must be fast-tracked, then additional labor is typically needed, so there is a cost for every management decision made regarding the need for triage.