Triage Decision-Making Skills

In Brief Triage decision making is an essential skill for nurses. Through initial assessment, a nurse must be able to prioritize patient care on the basis of appropriate decision making. The purpose of this article is to present pilot study data on the Triage Decision-Making Inventory, which measures the identification of critical thinking, cognitive characteristics, intuition, and experience when making triage decisions. Establishing reliability and validity of the instrument in a sample of nurses with diverse specialties allows staff development experts to use the inventory to tailor training for new graduates and practicing nurses. The authors report a pilot study on an instrument to measure critical thinking and intuition when making triage decisions.