Journal of accident & emergency medicine
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To determine the warning time given to accident and emergency (A&E) departments by the ambulance service before arrival of a critically ill or injured patient. To determine if this could be increased by ambulance personnel alerting within five minutes of arrival at scene. ⋯ A&E departments could be alerted much earlier by the ambulance service. This would allow staff to be assembled and preparations to be made. Disadvantages may be an increased "alert rate" and wastage of staff time while waiting the ambulance arrival.
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To determine the level of agreement between senior medical staff when asked to perform retrospective case note review of nursing triage decisions, both before and after development of a consensus approach. ⋯ Audit of nurse triage categorisation by senior medical staff performing case note review has only fair to moderate consistency between reviewers. Use of this technique will result in frustration among those whose performance is being audited if they recognise inconsistency in the standard they are compared against.
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To demonstrate how emergency department triage scale and thrombolysis indicator data can be used to document the impact of a substantial increase in resource allocation. ⋯ Use of the Australasian national triage scale and time to thrombolysis clinical indicator data allows a quantitative assessment of the impact of increased emergency department resource allocation.