Week 6 Field session: The triage table

A tabletop exercise where your group writes a triage scale, then runs a surge through it and watches it fail.

31 March 2027

This is the only session that happens entirely in the room, and going by past years it is also the one students end up talking about afterwards.

What happens#

Thirty minutes. In groups of four, you write a triage scale for a service that is not medical. Past years have used a student counselling service, a housing allocation desk, a roadside assistance dispatcher and a university IT helpdesk. Categories, a time promise for each in actual units, and one paragraph of rationale.

The time promise is the hard part and the point. It is very easy to write four categories. It is very hard to write down that category three waits ninety minutes and then defend it to the room.

Forty minutes. You run a deck of forty arrival cards through your scale. Each card is a person with a description, not a category; classifying them is your job and the cards are written to be ambiguous. Normal load first.

Thirty minutes. Surge. The same scale, three times the arrival rate, same capacity. Every scale fails here, and how it fails is what we are looking at. Most groups discover their category two becomes meaningless and they start triaging within it, which is exactly what happens in the field.

Twenty minutes. Each group reads out who their scale treats worst.

Bring#

• Nothing. Cards, sheets and timers are provided.
• Come having read the week 6 lecture notes if you were not there. The surge round does not work if you have not seen a real scale.

What leaves the room#

Your group’s written scale, the two run sheets, and one paragraph naming the group it treats worst and whether you would defend that in public. That paragraph is the seed of Whose Time It Was for most people.