Determination of the skill and knowledge level of Gümüşhane ambulance service staff on start triage

Triage is briefly defined as the prioritization of individuals who need emergency care based on certain criteria. Emergency personnel may encounter incidents that require triage practice in their professional lives. These incidents could be a traffic accident involving two casualties or could be a much greater disaster. Emergency health personels aim to raise the survival rate to the highest level by applying triage in such cases. Undoubtedly, a healthy triage is necessary to increase survival rate. The aim of the study in this context is to determine the START triage knowledge and skill level of emergency health personnel who may encounter Mass casuality incident at any time. The study was designed as a cross-sectional study on emergency health workers. The research was carried out in Gümüşhane province between September and November 2017 on 127 staff who accepted to fill out the questionnaire and filled the questionnaires completely among the 178 personnel who had the potential to go incident by ambulance. As a data gathering tool, Aghababaeian et al.'s (2012) instrument that was original English, Triage Knowledge Level and Triage Skill Level determination scales were adapted to Turkish and it was used. Analyzes of the data were analyzed with the SPSS 22 package program. Mean, percent, standard deviation and frequency were given. Mean were compared by using "Independent Sampling t Test", "One Way Anova", "Mann-Whitney U Test" and "Kruskal-Wallis H Test". Also Correlation and regression analyzes were used to determine the relationship between knowledge and skill levels. As a result of the study, it was determined that participants had a moderate level of knowledge (65,7) and skill (59,2) about START triage, the skill level was significantly higher in those who received UMKE basic education and TRK in-service training. Also, it was determined that the level of knowledge varies according to age, title, last graduated program, and workplace. Morover level of knowledge has an effect on the Level of Triage Skill.