Chest pain triage: gut feeling or protocol-based care?

摘要

With interest, we read the paper by Harskamp et al. in this issue of the Netherlands Heart Journal [1]. The authors anticipate enhanced triage of patients presenting with chest pain in primary care in the future. Presently, general practitioners (GPs) perform triage by estimating the urgency based on history taking and physical examination only. They have found an effective and acceptable way of not missing too many major adverse cardiac events (MACEs) by allowing a moderately high referral rate, without compromising the task of effective triage [2].