The study of disaster triage is made difficult by the complex emotional response of potentially lifesaving intervention that a triage officer must make decisions based on a succinct and efficient algorithm.

We designed a survey of triage professionals in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Beijing to identify sources of emotional bias that lead to failure of the START triage protocol that result in a lack of correlation between triage priority and clinical outcomes.

Among our subjects, we observed that a pediatric victim is uniformly overtriaged when compared to less injured victims. We examine the possible reasons behind the consistency of this selection, explain the means we used to minimise bias, and propose avenues for further research and clinical implementation of better triage systems and guidelines.