Nurses in a hematology/oncology practice are responsible for the triage and management of phone calls from a diverse oncology population. An initiative was developed at the authors' institution to identify the educational needs of RNs while designing strategies to educate and improve telephone triage skills. The goal was to standardize triage practice and ultimately improve the effectiveness of...

Pediatric telephone triage programs have been initiated to reduce overcrowding of pediatric medical facilities, yet it is unclear what impact these programs have on reducing after hours room visits. This study used a decision analysis model and data from reference literature to investigate the effectiveness of this program and determine the factors that influence the results. The decision analy...

For the purpose of developing a national system for outbreak surveillance, local outbreak signals were compared in three sources of syndromic data--telephone triage of acute gastroenteritis, web queries about symptoms of gastrointestinal illness, and over-the-counter (OTC) pharmacy sales of antidiarrhoeal medication. The data sources were compared against nine known waterborne and foodborne out...

OBJECTIVE To compare doctors' and nurses' communication with patients in primary care telephone triage consultations. DESIGN Qualitative comparative study of content and form of questions in 51 telephone triage encounters between practitioners (general practitioners (GPs)=29; nurses=22) and patients requesting a same-day appointment in primary care. Audio-recordings of nurse-led calls were sy...

PURPOSE Describe patient satisfaction and patient-reported outcomes after voluntary use of a telephone-based nurse triage service. METHODS A random sample of symptomatic callers who contacted the triage service in 1999 was identified. A computer-assisted telephone survey was conducted, resulting in a response rate of 58.9 percent and a sample size of 35,374. SUMMARY Overall satisfaction wit...