The primary objective of triage is to rapidly identify patients with critical and time-sensitive conditions and to prioritize their care above those who can wait [1].
Furthermore, permanent access to radiologists, pediatricians, psychiatrist, neurologists, and neurosurgeons was almost non-existent; the ability of low-volume EDs to manage time-sensitive conditions was therefore limited.
Many time-sensitive conditions with widely recognized utility of CPU were identified as needing CPU only sometimes or rarely by many faculty.
Crowding, physicians with limited experience, and the heterogeneity of emergency care capabilities were likely threats to the ubiquitous and consistent delivery of quality emergency care, particularly for time-sensitive conditions.
These findings are consistent with prior findings that failure to distinguish patients with critical and time-sensitive conditions contributes to the delays in disposition and time-sensitive treatments and to the increases in potentially avoidable morbidity and mortality [6 9].
It also identified crowding and the provision of emergency care by physicians with limited experience in EM as potential threats to the universal delivery of quality emergency care, particularly for time-sensitive conditions.
We created the critical care resuscitation unit to expedite transfers of adult critically ill patients with time-sensitive conditions to a quaternary academic medical center, hypothesizing that this would decrease time to transfer, increase transfer volume, and improve outcomes.
Since these data can guide treatment recommendations, it is imperative that time-based prehospital documentation is accurate and precise, especially for time-sensitive conditions such as out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA).
Universal provision of quality emergency care, particularly for time-sensitive conditions (such as fibrinolytic therapy for acute ischemic stroke, revascularization in acute myocardial infarction, or management of severe injury or trauma), is an essential component of any highly developed health care system, such as the Swiss health care system.
One report [ 10] linked ED overcrowding to delays in identification and treatment of time-sensitive conditions, such as acute coronary syndrome, stroke, surgical emergencies, and septic shock.
