Why should more than two reliability coefficients be reported in triage studies?
Amir Mirhaghi · 2026
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Description
Amir Mirhaghi argues, in a 2026 Matters Arising letter, that studies of triage reliability should report more than two agreement coefficients. He responds to a Swedish study of a modified South African Triage Scale used by ambulance crews, which found only poor agreement between raters on the overall category.
His critique starts from the study's own numbers. The coefficient it used, Krippendorff's alpha, is among the most cautious in use. That caution makes comparison with studies using other statistics treacherous. Collapsing categories into high and low acuity made agreement look worse still. Mirhaghi presses several points of method on how reliability is summed up and compared. The letter asks triage teams to check several coefficients side by side before calling a tool unreliable.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Amir Mirhaghi |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 7 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |