Manchester Triage System Telephone Triage and Advice

MTS as a telephone triage and advice tool has been used by the North West Ambulance Service since 2006 for the routine secondary assessment of non-immediate 999 calls.

Since then, a number of other Ambulance Service across the UK including Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire and London have all adopted the same system to enable the telephone assessment of both urgent and emergency calls.

The MTS TTA has also been introduced internationally in Norway, New Zealand and Australia, where it is being used for secondary triage of emergency calls, and in the Azores where it is being used as both a primary and secondary triage tool.

Manchester Triage System

Every day, Emergency Departments are faced with increasing numbers of patients suffering from a wide range of problems; from minor illness and injury to major trauma and life threatening conditions. In order to ensure patient safety, it is essential that patients are seen in order of clinical priority and not in order of attendance.

Early Emergency Department triage was intuitive rather than methodological, and rather than being based on clinical evidence, it was based on the practitioners' own experience and clinical judgement; making it neither consistent nor auditable.  The use of the Manchester Triage System ensures that a consistent approach to patient assessment and prioritisation is maintained allowing for robust audit and increased patient safety.

The Manchester Triage System is a clinical risk management tool used by clinicians worldwide to enable them to safely manage patient flow when clinical need far exceeds capacity. It is a professional, expert system and the most, rather than the least experienced personnel in the department should be using it.