Informative triage scales may be superior to non-informative ones in case of poor clinical expertise of raters

[...]nurses might assign patients to a higher category and cause overtriage, once dealt with uncertain situations. [...]internal validity might have been biased by the poor clinical expertise among the nursing students. In this respect, the mean unweighted value of kappa in regard to reference was 0.41 (namely, moderate) in the nurses (0.37–0.50) and 0.28 (viz., fair) in the nursing students (0.21–0.33), suggesting that the clinical expertise of the assessors was effective in the validity of the study results. [...]comparing FRENCH scale with ESI scale may not be appropriate in this study because of differences that is embedded in the nature of scales and not considering clinical expertise of raters. [...]it is of utmost importance to be very careful about the comprehensive definition of scenarios in triage reliability assessment research. [...]no superiority of FRENCH scale over ESI scale should be assumed based on this study, but it can be said that informative triage scales may be superior to other non-informative scales in case of poor clinical expertise.