Validation of the Pediatric Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale at the Emergency Department of a Tertiary Children’s Hospital in Costa Rica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Pediatric Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (PedCTAS) is a recognized system that prioritizes care by the severity of illness. The goal of this study was to describe and analyze the results from the implementation of the PedCTAS in a tertiary children's hospital in Costa Rica. METHODS: This was a retrospective observational study of children presenting to the emergency department (ED) from 1st January to 31st December of 2019 in the only children's hospital in Costa Rica. Outcome measures were hospitalization, ICU admission, waiting times from triage to physician time (TPT), left without being seen (LWBS), length of stay (LOS), in relation to the triage level, and final disposition. RESULTS: A total of 93,001 patients were admitted to the ED. The proportion for hospitalizations according to triage category was 85.3%, 40%, 14%, 4.3%, and 2% for patients triaged at CTAS levels I, II, III, IV, and V respectively. A total of 2045 (2.19%) patients were LWBS. Some 585 (0.62%) patients were admitted to ICU. Median TPT for each category was for levels I:12 min, II:20 min, III:22 min, IV:34 min, and V:54 min. The LOS in the ED patients triaged as levels I and II stayed longer and the mortality rate was also higher in patients classified as levels I and II. The mortality rate was for level I patients 44.2% (23 patients) and level II 1.4% (8 patients). CONCLUSIONS: This study shows evidence of validation of the PedCTAS in a developing country in Latin America. Implementation of a validated triage tool in our country helps us to provide improvements in the care of pediatric patients in the ED.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".