The Ten Second Triage Tool - a multi-disciplinary simulation-based field test to determine its speed, accuracy and...

Area of Science:

• Emergency Medicine
• Trauma Care
• Disaster Response

Background:

• Traditional major incident triage in the UK relies on physiological assessment by healthcare responders.
• This approach can cause delays in delivering critical life-saving interventions (LSIs), especially in initial incident phases.
• The Ten Second Triage (TST) tool was developed to accelerate triage and LSI delivery.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the performance of the TST tool in a simulated major incident.
• To compare the TST's effectiveness with the NHS Major Incident Triage Tool (MITT).
• To assess the time to deliver LSIs and triage accuracy using the TST.

Main Methods:

• A prospective observational study using a simulated major incident with diverse trauma pathologies.
• Inclusion of responders from Police, Fire, and Ambulance services.
• Assessment of TST alone, MITT alone, and a combined TST-MITT approach, measuring triage time, LSI delivery time, and categorization accuracy.

Main Results:

• TST alone resulted in a mean triage time of 377 seconds per casualty, significantly faster than MITT alone (1500 seconds).
• The TST enabled a clinically significant reduction in time to deliver LSIs (491 seconds) compared to MITT (1377 seconds).
• Triage accuracy was comparable between TST (80.3%) and MITT (79.3%), with similar TST performance across responder types.

Conclusions:

• The TST is a rapid and accurate early scene triage method for major incidents.
• It facilitates faster delivery of key life-saving interventions compared to existing physiological methods.
• Findings support the NHS England endorsement of the TST for improving emergency response.