Abstract

Background:  The Manchester Triage System (MTS) is an extremely useful tool in Urgency Services (US) as it allows increasing the efficiency in patients' care. Patients are subjected to a triage made by a nurse who attributes them different colours depending on the emergency of their need. MTS is essential to identify the patients who need immediate attention and those who can safely wait for a longer time.

Aim:  Analyze waiting times at a hospital’s emergency service where Manchester Triage System is applied, its management, efficacy and correspondence to the theory.

Methods: This study is a retrospective and observational study. The sample consists in all the patients who had entered in the US of a Portugal’s hospital since the implementation moment of MTS to 2008. The SPSS database was used to modify, create variables and do statistical analysis, using the median as the summary measure.

Results: From the total of cases, 47% of the cases had the value “waiting time”, but from these we had to filter, since there were some negative values or values that exceeded the 24 hours. Therefore only 156477 cases were analysed. Moreover as the urgency of the cases increase, the number of cases with the time of medical assessment increase. It is also observed that as the urgency of the cases gets higher, the number of cases with a waiting time exceeded increase too. Furthermore,  knowing that the patient died, the number of cases that waited more than the foreseen time is higher than the ones that didn’t exceeded. Finally, the percentage of the exceeded waiting time increased in the most recent trimesters in comparison to the first ones.

Discussion: Despite of the higher number of missing cases it was possible to conclude that: it is easier to exceed the waiting time in the more urgent cases, like the red ones; there are two tight relationships involving rate of death with the waiting time and with the urgency of cases; the efficiency rate of MTS has decreased along the time.

Key words: Manchester Triage System (MTS), Urgency Service (US), Waiting Times.