Triage is the process of determining the priority of patients based on the severity of their condition when there are insufficient resources for medical care for everyone at once. It can be used to determine priority of emergency treatment, the order of emergency transport, or the transport destination.
Triage consists of sorting patients according to the level of injuries and treatment needed. Patients are assigned to one of the five color-coded tags (red, yellow, green, white and black), which indicate the need and level of care. It is essential that during triage, one assesses the patient’s initial medical priorities instead of treating patient’s medical needs. In addition, those who are triaging must be aware of the availability of resources. Patients may be re-triaged as the incident events or patients’ needs change [8]