RED TAG PATIENTS IN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT

Emergency Department (ED) provides an immediate treatment to patients with a broad spectrum of life- threatening or potential life threatening clinical problems. These patients are also known as red tag patients, based on our institution triage protocol. The distribution of these cases and the effectiveness of ED are not known to us. Therefore, we conducted a 6 months cross sectional study in our ED who received 50,000 attendances annually. We analysed and studied the eligible red tag patients up to one week to determine the mortality distribution. We made an assumption that the emergency management influences the one week patient''s survival. By understanding the distribution including the patients'' demographic profiles and disease characteristics along with the relationship between the types of illness and the outcome, upgrading of the image and status of ED, improving the effectiveness and efficiency of emergency management can be achieved. Knowledge from this study will serve as a guide on future studies and it alerts the clinicians to focus on primary and secondary prevention of specific diseases.