White Paper: Why Do We Triage?

Why do we triage? Primarily, if we are doing our jobs correctly identifying non-conformances we would be overwhelmed if we didn’t perform some type of triage. Like an emergency room, if we try to treat every patient with the same urgency and priority we would probably not give enough attention to the ones that have the highest urgency. There just isn’t the resources or time to complete this. In our industry, there are so many events that can be de ned as non-conformances there is no way we could possibly perform root cause analysis and find a corrective action for each event. Somehow, many companies still feel the need to treat all non-conformances equal and try to find a corrective action for each event, all with the same default due date which is often 30 days. Without triage it just isn’t possible for a company to consider the important high risk events with the right amount of resources and urgency.