A vet's notebook: triage during the rescue rush

Triage in a rescue rush is not a textbook chapter. It is a noisy room, a queue of casualties, and a set of decisions that have to be good enough rather than perfect — repeated for hours, until the queue is gone.

How we sorted the room

The triage decision is not 'who is sickest'. It is 'who do we lose if we look at someone else first'.

We worked in three colours — red for immediate intervention, yellow for monitored care, green for safe-to-wait. The colour was written on a piece of tape on the carrier door so it could be re-scored as quickly as it was set.

Two volunteers were assigned to rescore the room every fifteen minutes. That was the single most useful procedural change we made the second day.

What we would change next time

• Stage hydration and shade outside the triage room, not inside it.
• Build a one-page protocol sheet per species before the season starts — not during it.
• Roster a dedicated record-keeper so the clinical team is not also the data-entry team.