"For Timely Transfer and Treatment of Emergency Patients" ... 119 Ambulance Team and Hospitals Unify 'Severity Classification'

Ministry of Health and Welfare, Fire Agency, and Korean Society of Emergency Medicine to Conduct One-Month Pilot Program Until End of September

[Asia Economy Reporter Jo In-kyung] The criteria for classifying patient severity used by 119 emergency medical teams during the transport of emergency patients and the criteria for assessing patient acuity upon hospital arrival will be unified to ensure timely transport and efficient treatment of emergency patients.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare, the National Fire Agency, the Korean Society of Emergency Medicine, and the Central Emergency Medical Center of the National Medical Center announced that from the 29th of this month to the 30th of next month, the second pilot project of the "Prehospital Korean Triage and Acuity Scale (Pre-KTAS)" will be conducted targeting a total of 14 fire stations: 11 fire stations in northern Gyeonggi Province and 3 fire stations in the Cheonan and Asan areas of Chungnam Province.

The Prehospital Korean Triage and Acuity Scale (Pre-KTAS) is a method that classifies patients into five levels based on the urgency of their condition at the prehospital stage. Currently, 119 emergency medical teams assess patient conditions and classify severity into categories such as emergency, non-emergency, and potential emergency when transporting patients to hospitals. However, since these criteria differ from hospital severity classification standards, there have been calls to unify patient severity classification between the prehospital and hospital stages.

In particular, as the number of COVID-19 patients surged last year, emergency rooms in large hospitals became saturated, frequently causing ambulances to fail to transport critically ill emergency patients in a timely manner. In response, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the National Fire Agency, and the Korean Society of Emergency Medicine decided to actively promote a policy to unify patient severity classification and appropriately distribute transport according to patient grades as part of measures to improve the emergency medical system for critically ill emergency patients.

Accordingly, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, together with the National Fire Agency and the Korean Society of Emergency Medicine, spent three months preparing from December 2021 to introduce the Prehospital Korean Triage and Acuity Scale. In March of this year, they developed an app for the Pre-KTAS and conducted the first pilot project from May to June at six fire stations in Gyeonggi and Chungnam.

The first pilot project aimed to verify the validity of the Pre-KTAS and improve the app used by field emergency medical personnel. In this second pilot project, 119 emergency medical teams will actively use the Pre-KTAS to select transport hospitals.

Park Hyang, Director of Public Health Policy at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, said, "We hope this pilot project will help alleviate overcrowding in advanced emergency medical centers and emergency rooms and serve as an opportunity to advance the emergency medical system toward more efficient treatment."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.