A Novel Triage Approach to Identifying Health Concerns

Area of Science:

• Pediatrics
• Healthcare Management
• Public Health

Background:

• Preventive child health care (PCH) traditionally involves full physician/nurse assessment for all children.
• A novel triage approach pre-assesses children with a physician's assistant, involving physicians/nurses only for follow-up cases.
• This study compares the effectiveness of triage vs. traditional PCH assessment methods.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the efficacy of a novel triage approach in detecting health problems during routine child health assessments.
• To compare the detection rates of overweight, visual disorders, and psychosocial problems between triage and traditional PCH approaches.
• To assess the impact of the triage approach on clinician workload in PCH.

Main Methods:

• Prospective cohort study involving 1897 children aged 5-6 and 10-11 years.
• Compared detection of overweight, visual disorders, and psychosocial problems using BMI, Snellen, Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, and Child Behavior Checklist.
• Analyzed differences in health problem detection and severity between traditional and triage PCH approaches.

Main Results:

• No significant differences in detecting overweight, visual disorders, or psychosocial problems between the two approaches.
• The triage approach showed significantly higher Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire scores in children with psychosocial problems.
• Marginal differences were observed in the severity of overweight detection for the overweight subgroup.

Conclusions:

• The novel triage approach in PCH demonstrates comparable effectiveness to the traditional method in detecting key health issues.
• This approach reduces physician and nurse involvement in routine assessments without compromising detection rates.
• Further investigation is required to ascertain the long-term outcomes associated with the triage approach.