Professor Mick Malloy

So there are two aspects to this, Ciara.

One is the triage in the door of the emergency department and the other is the triage on the phone that happens at the NHS.

And the difference between the NHS and our HSE is it's integrated from the emergency departments to primary care, to many of the other services around.

And we don't have the same sort of integration currently within the HSE.

which would make it a little bit more difficult to achieve here.

I agree it can lead to reduced waiting times, but the people that it reduces the waiting times for are those who would have had excessively long waits and the people who turn up in emergency departments with very low priority conditions can have excessive waits because there are always more serious conditions to be seen before them.

That's the purpose of triage, to make sure that nobody with a very serious condition has to wait excessively long periods of time.

But if your rooms are already full and your emergency department rooms are full of patients who've been lodged or admitted the day before and waiting for an inpatient,

in a hospital bed.

A digital system won't speed up the process for new people coming in the door because there's a capacity issue which we have to address.

So triage in itself is a very brief process where it's computerized.

The nurse who sees you in the triage room goes through what you believe are the relevant issues for you on that particular day.

And by following particular algorithms, you end up with a code.

One would be seen immediately.

Two would be seen within a half an hour.

Three within one hour.

Four up to three or four hours.

And five, you could be waiting for a long period of time.

So it depends on the individual understanding everything that's wrong with them at that particular time to make sure people don't get incorrectly triaged lower than they should be.

But it still is only a limited amount of information.