FRENCH versus ESI: comparison between two nurse triage emergency scales with referent scenarios

OBJECTIVES: Acute triage is needed to prioritize care and achieve optimal resource allocation in busy emergency departments. The main objective is to compare the FRench Emergency Nurse Classification in Hospital scale (FRENCH) to the American scale Emergency Severity Index (ESI). Secondary objectives are to compare for each scale the over and under-triage, the triage matching to the gold standard and the inter-individual sorting reproducibility between the nurses. METHODS: This is a prospective observational study conducting among the nursing staffs and nursing students, selected from Caen University College Hospital and Lisieux Hospital Center emergency departments between two months. Each group individually rank 60 referent clinical cases composed by scales designers. An assessment of scale practicality is collected after for each tool. The collected parameters are analyzed by a Cohen kappa concordance test (κ). RESULTS: With 8151 triage results of gold standard scenarios sorting in two scales by the same nurses, the FRENCH scale seems to give better triage results than the US ESI scale (nurse: FRENCH 60% and ESI 53%, p = 0.003 ; nursing students: FRENCH 49% and ESI 42%, p < 0.001). In the two groups ESI has also a big tendency to under-sort (p = 0.01), particularly for the most severe patients (p < 0.01). The interobserver sorting concordance for any experience gives good results for the FRENCH and the ESI without any difference (nurses : FRENCH K(PQ)=0.72 ESI K(PQ)=0.78; p = 0.32 ; students K(PQ)=0.44 K(PQ)=0.55; p = 0.22). CONCLUSION: The ESI and FRENCH scales comparison on 8151 sorting results shows direct validity in favor of FRENCH one and similar interobserver agreement for both scales. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12873-022-00752-z.