DO THE NATIONAL PERFORMANCE TABLES REALLY INDICATE THE PERFORMANCE OFACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS

Objective-To determine the current practice of nurse triage in acciden t and emergency departments in England, and to examine the relation be tween triage systems and performance in the Department of Health compa rative performance guide. Design-A postal questionnaire was sent to al l consultants in accident and emergency medicine in England. Results-1 51 responses were analysed, representing of the departments seeing at 15000 annually. Triage systems throughout departments, ranging between advanced triage, partial triage, and ''eyeballing''. There is no stan dardisation of the process or duration of triage. There appears to be no standard method of measuring the time to immediate assessment. Ther e is no correlation between the quality of initial assessment and perf ormance in the tables. Conclusions-The national performance figures do not correlate with the quality of the initial assessment; comparisons based on these figures are therefore misleading. More effective perfo rmance indicators are available, which would provide a truer indicatio n of the quality of accident and emergency services.