[The triage in disaster medicine: analysis of a practical exercise].

Background: The triage is a procedure for casualties classification using some criteria (severity, survival, therapeutical delay, etc.) which is basic for the preparedness of health personnel in event of disaster. Even being a basic procedure, its teaching and training is not enough extended among health personnel. The goal of this study was assess the efficacy of teaching triage procedures in terms of its capability to carry out the examination and classification of massive casualties under different conditions of environmental difficulties.

Methods: 25 couples of health professionals (doctor and nurse) were trained during 90 minutes on triage procedures and them aleatory located at 3 groups with 12 simulated casualties at each group corresponding to 3 different levels of environmental difficulties. They were asked to perform the triage and complete the information contained at the triage card. This information was analyzed in order to see and compare the results of each group.

Results: All the health professionals showed high correlations between observed and expected responses for the evacuation priority variable. However, only the group of less environmental difficulty showed a significative statistical correlation (p = 0.03). No significative statistical differences were found on the diagnostic classification but the adjust level was poor for the high environmental difficulties group.

Conclusions: Acceptable levels of efficacy on triage procedures can be obtained using a single teaching session of theoretical contents plus a practical exercise, specially for the casualties prioritization. On the other hand, environmental conditions looks as a variable influencing the efficacy of other acceptable results expected on this kind of technic perhaps requiring further training.