Older Patients with “Non-Urgent” Complaints Are More Likely to be Admitted

It is an emergency medicine truism that everything is more complicated in patients at the extremes of age. These authors explored outcomes for older patients who were initially triaged as being “less urgent” or “non-urgent.”

The authors reviewed randomly selected charts of 350 patients age 65 years or older who were seen at one of two large Canadian emergency departments and who were triaged as category 4 (less urgent) or 5 (not urgent), according to the Canadian Triage and Acuity Score. For comparison, they also reviewed 150 randomly selected charts of patients 40 to 55 years old who were similarly triaged.

Reasons for presentation were similar in the two groups, with large numbers of skin and soft tissue complaints and extremity pain. Older…