Physician bias during patient selection in the pediatric emergency department

STUDY OBJECTIVES:To evaluate whether pediatric or emergency medicine residents exhibit a bias when they select patients from triage based on the chief complaint, ie, medical versus surgical in the pediatric emergency department (PED). DESIGN: SETTING: TYPE OF PARTICIPANTS: INTERVENTIONS: MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS:Five hundred and ninetynine charts were included in the study. On the basis of the triage complaint the initial diagnosis was classified as either surgical or medical. Surgical diagnoses were assigned to those patients who required a surgical procedure, involved a surgical subspecialty or were victims of trauma and represented 151 (25.2%) of the patients seen. Medical diagnoses were assigned to the nonsurgical patients and represented 448 (74.8%) of the patients seen. There are roughly three pediatric residents to each emergency resident working in our PED. Of the 367 patients seen by the pediatric residents, 73 (19.9%) had surgical diagnoses, and 294 (80.1%) had medical diagnoses. Of the 158 patients seen by the emergency residents, 59 (37.3%) had surgical diagnoses and 99 (62.7%) had medical diagnoses. X analysis was used to compare categorical variables. The P value was considered significant at