ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: The steady increase in the number of visits to the various emergency services combined with the decrease in medical demographics, make it necessary to optimize triage of patients to improve their care. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the pertinence of our triage questionnaire in the classification of ophthalmologic emergencies by severity. METHODS: We used a monocentric cross-sectional study. From September 5 through September 25 2017, 858 patients who had all been seen in the ophthalmology emergency department of Pierre Paul Riquet Hospital of Toulouse university medical center and had responded to the triage nurse questionnaire were included. According to the symptoms presented or not by the patient, a color code was attributed (GREEN, ORANGE or RED) in order of increasing level of emergency. For each patient, we compared the severity of the final diagnosis by Base Score with the level of emergency established by our questionnaire. RESULTS: There were 118 "GREEN" patients, 606 "ORANGE" patients and 134 "RED." We were able to analyze 822 patients. 21.65% of patients were correctly classified, 73.36% were overestimated (of which 87.06% by one level and 12.94% by two levels of severity), and 4.99% were underestimated (of which 90.24% by one level and 9.76% by two levels). CONCLUSION: Our current triage questionnaire is not sufficiently discriminating for effective triage of ophthalmologic emergencies. It often overestimates minor emergencies, causing a delay in treating other emergencies. We propose a new questionnaire modified according to the results obtained during our study.
