Emergency department triage performance timing. A regional multicenter descriptive study in Italy.

Objectives: We explored the time employed by nurses to perform the ED triage process in the clinical setting. Moreover, we assessed the influences on triage timing performance exerted by variables related to nurses, local EDs' features, and by interruptions.

Methods: This is a multicenter prospective descriptive-explorative study performed in 11 EDs of the Tuscany region (Italy), using a 5 tier triage system.

Communication during handover in the pre-hospital/hospital interface in Italy: from evaluation to implementation of multidisciplinary training through high-fidelity simulation.

Communication failures in the pre-hospital/hospital interface have been identified as a major preventable cause of patient harm. This interface has not adequately been studied in Italy. In this study, we: (1) evaluated the communication of pre-hospital and hospital providers during handover through the analysis of simulation sessions; (2) identified the critical information that should be routinely communicated during handover with a survey administered to emergency triage nurses; (3) measured communication within this interface through the adaptation of an existing tool from a multidisciplinary focus group; (4) validated the adapted tool with the inter-rater agreement of physicians who reviewed video recordings from multidisciplinary simulations sessions; and (5) developed a handover training for pre-hospital providers and evaluated the communication improvement between pre- and post-training.