Triage in accident and emergency. 2: Educational requirements

The first article in this two-part series on the review of the concept of triage (Vol 8(2): 86-102) examined the areas of waiting times, patient satisfaction and the difficulty of trying to implement universal standards into accident and emergency (A&E) departments because of their varying infrastructures. This article aims to identify the educational requirements needed to become a triage nurse. Indeed, none of the reviewed literature explicitly addresses this issue. Educational literature tends to focus on the scientific aspect of practice rather than acknowledging that art, where interactions between the nurse and patient are essentially social acts that can never be accounted for by science, is also an inherent part of nursing practice. This article also investigates and analyses the use of research methods utilized to investigate triage and suggests that a re-evaluation of these methods is needed if the true effects of triage are to be ascertained.