Triage is the process of assessing and prioritising patients based on the severity and urgency of their medical condition. It determines who gets treated first when resources (time, staff, equipment) are limited. The goal is to ensure that the sickest patients receive the fastest care.
The word comes from the French trier, meaning “to sort.”
You’ll hear this when…
Triage happens in every emergency department. When you arrive at an ED, a triage nurse assesses your symptoms, vital signs, and medical history, then assigns a priority level. In the US, many hospitals use the Emergency Severity Index (ESI), a five-level system where ESI-1 is the most critical (life-threatening) and ESI-5 is the least urgent.
Outside the ED, “triage” is used more broadly. A primary care office triages phone calls to determine which patients need same-day appointments. A mental health clinic triages referrals to allocate limited therapy slots. In healthcare administration, “triaging” a backlog means sorting tasks by urgency.
Outside healthcare
The term has been adopted by software, project management, and customer support teams. “Bug triage” in software development means reviewing reported issues and prioritising them by severity. The core concept — assess, prioritise, allocate limited resources — travels well across fields. For more on how terms like this get reinvented across industries, see why every industry reinvents the word “pipeline”.
Source: Emergency Severity Index (ESI) implementation handbook, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)