title: Putting the nurse back into triageCherine Woolwich looks at the current trends in nurse triage and finds she has been asking similar questions to the ones posed by Edwards ( 1999 ) in 'What's wrong with triage?' which appeared in last month's issue of Emergency Nurse.
abstract: I was one of those A&E nurses in the mid-eighties and early nineties who was committed to the concept of nurse triage as a means of providing better care for patients. I felt it was crucial for emergency nurses to recognise the importance of nurse triage and the part that they could play in its development. Estrada ( 1981 ) referred to 'non-professional triage' when patients were not seen and assessed by a nurse. She said of nurse triage that it was 'a professional judgment, made by a professional nurse'.