Abdominal pain is among the most common emergency department complaints, presenting unique diagnostic and treatment challenges. The broad range of differential diagnoses creates the risk of a missed diagnosis, over-investigation resulting in resource misappropriation, and undue intervention. Furthermore, nurses providing triage should have established triage and communication protocols in place. The South Jordan University of Utah community clinic (SJUC) is in the unique position of having an urgent and a stand-alone emergency department. The urgent care nurses triage patients with acute symptoms to either the urgent care or the emergency department (ED). There is currently not a standardized triage protocol in place. Evidence-Based Framework: The scholarly project was to implement the Emergency Severity Index by triage nurses for patients with abdominal pain. Outcome measures involved a cross-sectional analysis, comparing the Emergency Severity Index (ESI) score given to the patient at the time of triage to the resources used once the patient had been triaged to the emergency department. Patients that were triaged to the urgent care setting were given a presumptive score of four or five. Methods: Data was gathered over four weeks. Statistical analysis was performed using Fisher’s Exact test to determine if a statistically signficant relationship existed between the triage score given by the SJUC triage nurse and the resources used in diagnosing and treating the patient. Lewin;s theory of unfreezing-change-refreezing is the theoretical framework that has been selected for the scholarly project. The Iowa Model of Evidence-Based Practice to Promote Quality Care has been selected as the project’s evidence-based model. Findings and Conclusions: After reviewing the educational PowerPoint and implementing the ESI, there was an overall triage accuracy of 84%, with 100% accuracy in patients sent to the Emergency department (ED) and a 71% accuracy rate in patients triaged to urgent care. However, there was no previous data to review using a two-tail Fisher’s Exact test with an alpha of 0.05. The association between the intervention and outcomes was clinically significant, with a p-value of 0.0482. Based on the findings, it can be argued that providing the training on and implementation is clinically significant and prompts further studies of the ESI in the SJUC setting.
