Objective triage in the disaster setting: will children and expecting mothers be treated like others?

The study of disaster triage is made difficult by the complex emotional response of potentially lifesaving intervention that a triage officer must make basing decisions on a succinct and efficient algorithm. A survey of triage professionals in international settings was designed to identify possible emotionally led bias that affects objective decision making in identifying victims most likely to benefit from immediate life support intervention. This survey suggests a lack of correlation between triage priority and predictable clinical outcomes as predicted by the Revised Trauma Score tool. Among the subjects, it was observed that a pediatric victim is uniformly overtriaged when compared to less injured victims.