LO75: Interrater agreement and time it takes to assign a Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale score in 7 emergency departments

Abstract

Introduction: The Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) is the standard used in all Canadian (and many international) emergency departments (EDs) for establishing the priority by which patients should be assessed. In addition to its clinical utility, CTAS has become an important administrative metric used by governments to estimate patient care requirements, ED funding and workload models. Despite its importance, the process by which CTAS scores are derived is highly variable. Emphasis on ED wait times has also drawn attention to the length of time the triage process takes. The primary objective of this study was to determine the interrater agreement of CTAS in current clinical practice. The secondary objective was to determine the time it takes to triage in a variety of ED settings. Methods: This was a prospective, observational study conducted in 7 hospital EDs, selected to represent a mix of triage processes (electronic vs. manual), documentation practices (electronic vs. paper), hospital types (rural, community and teaching) and patient volumes (annual ED census ranged from 38,000 to 136,000). An expert CTAS auditor observed on-duty triage nurses in the ED and assigned independent CTAS in real time. Research assistants not involved in the triage process independently recorded the triage time. Interrater agreement was estimated using unweighted and quadratic-weighted kappa statistics with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results: 738 consecutive patient CTAS assessments were audited over 21 seven-hour triage shifts. Exact modal agreement was achieved for 554 (75.0%) patients. Using the auditor’s CTAS score as the reference standard, on-duty triage nurses over-triaged 89 (12.1%) and under-triaged 95 (12.9%) patients. Interrater agreement was “good” with an unweighted kappa of 0.63 (95% CI: 0.58, 0.67) and quadratic-weighted kappa of 0.79 (95% CI: 0.67, 0.90). Research assistants captured triage time for 3808 patients over 69 shifts at 7 different EDs. Median (IQR) triage time was 5.2 (3.8, 7.3) minutes and ranged from 3.9 (3.1, 4.8) minutes to 7.5 (5.8, 10.8) minutes. Conclusion: Variability in the accuracy, and length of time taken to perform CTAS assessments suggest that a standardized approach to performing CTAS assessments would improve both clinical decision making, and administrative data accuracy.