The goal of triage is to prioritize patients who require the most urgent care and increase efficiency when resources are insufficient to treat all patients as per their degree or grade of injury. An effective and efficient emergency center triage system should be able to sort both trauma and non-trauma patients according to level of acuity. It also involves treatment as per the physiological parameters, either coded as red, orange, yellow, green or black. Kenyatta National Hospital has adopted the South African Triage Score (SATS) which has proven to be effective in monitoring the patients physiological parameters, it involves the use of a score form called triage early warning scores (TEWS). Several studies have found that emergency triage is an effective way to speed up the triage process, decrease waiting times, and boost patient outcomes in first-world nations. Low-income or limited-resource situations, on the other hand, present unique obstacles that might have a substantial effect on the selection and application of the most suitable triage scale and the success of its implementation. This study therefore evaluated the outcome of triaged and coded patients at accident and emergency department of Kenyatta National Hospital. Cross sectional research design was adopted with quantitative methods of data collection. A sample of 385 patients were used during this study, data collection was through structured questionnaires and checklist to assess the healthcare provider and institutional related factors. Data analysis included both descriptive and inferential statistics to test the association of the factors in relation to patient outcomes. The study results indicated that patient related factors had significant influence on management outcome of triaged patients’ (t-statistic=.210, p-value = 0.039 < 0.05). The other findings revealed that provider related factors had significant influence on management outcomes of patients triaged (t-statistic=13.055, p-value=0.002< 0.05). Further study results indicated that there was a positive and significant relationship between institutional related factors and management outcome of triaged patients’. This is depicted by a Pearson correlation coefficient r=0.452 p-value =0.008< 0.05 which was significant at 0.05 level of significance. This implies that improved institutional related factors result in an increase in management outcome of triaged patients. The study concludes that patients related factors, provider related factors and institutional related factors have an impact on the outcome of triaged and coded patients in accident and emergency department, Kenyatta national hospital. Thus it’s important for the institution to invest in human resource capacity, procurement of equipment and drugs to be used as well as improve on infrastructure. Further research to be done to determine the patient satisfaction levels as well as the staff training needs assessment.

Keywords: Patient outcomes, Triaging, Coded patients, Accident and emergency, Patient factors, Institutional factors