CTAS meaning in Medical ?

In medicine, triage () is a practice invoked when acute care cannot be provided for lack of resources. The process rations care towards those who are most in need of immediate care, and who benefit most from it. More generally it refers to prioritisation of medical care as a whole. In its acute form it is most often required on the battlefield, or at peacetime when an accident results in a mass casualty which swamps nearby healthcare facilities' capacity.

Triage always follows the modern interpretation of the Hippocratic oath, but otherwise there is plenty of leeway in interpretation, leading to more than one simultaneous idea of its nature. The best settled theories and practical scoring systems used in here come from the area of acute physical trauma in an emergency room setting; a broken bone obviously counts for less than uncontrolled arterial bleeding, apt to lead to death. But no current principle carries too well over to mental health, reproductive health (such as abortion), chronic medical conditions, geriatrics, or palliative care (including euthanasia). This is because triage needs to balance multiple and sometimes contradictory objectives simultaneously, most of them being fundamental to personhood: likelihood of death, efficacy of treatment, patients' remaining lifespan, ethics and religion of them all.

Because of this, medical drama often portrays triage in its most brutish form: torn limbs against a heart attack certainly yields a dramatic, Aesopian moral drama. In practical Western medicine such a form of triage is however exceedingly rare because resources are plentiful and future demand can be predicted well in advance.