Abstract

The article analyzes how nurses, who work at the triage service, contribute to the social construction of health data in a hospital emergency room. Our study is an organizational ethnography that adopts the perspective of the practice-based approach. We argue that sense-making processes of nurses are sometimes influenced by factors that differ from the clinical ones (on the basis of which they lead the triage assessment for the allocation of the priority code), such as clinical-organizational needs, legal liability, accountability, influencing, in turn, the same health data that can be used for purposes of evaluation, monitoring and programming of emergency departments.