The Benefits of Nursing Triage Services

What is a Nurse Telephone Triage?

Author:

Kurt Duncan

A nurse telephone triage service is a feature offered in some clinics or hospitals that let patients ask certain medical questions of experienced nurses.  However, a triage is about more than just a general Q&A.  These nurses have to be experienced and educated enough to make a cautious recommendation without seeing the patient in person.  Therefore, nurses must rely on their communication skills.  They may be asked to determine disease symptoms, or make treatment recommendations, provided the matter doesn’t immediately require a physician.  In addition to having good conversation qualities, a triage nurse must also have good listening skills so that she can ascertain any non-verbal communication that may be happening in a given call.

A nurse telephone triage is usually offered by healthcare facilities and perhaps by a physician\'s office directly.  Ideally, the patient would like to contact the doctor, but may be content to share information with the nurse.  These phone lines are often kept open “after hours” in the event of an emergency.  It should be noted that while nurses have to be perceptive about individual cases, they cannot diagnose clients over the phone.  Basically, the nurse telephone triage has the obligation to determine the severity of the caller’s complaint and then direct the caller to the appropriate emergency service.

Have you ever considered starting a nurse telephone triage line for your practice?  It may help tremendously, especially if you have patients that can never seem to “relax” and find it necessary to call you ten times a day.  Not that you devalue their business; but some patients may worry to an excessive degree.  If this is true of many of your clientele then you can certainly see the advantage in starting a nurse telephone triage line. 

Instead of hiring three or four staff members for a nurse telephone triage, you can always outsource the work to a medical call center.  Medical call centers are a step above the ordinary call center; these operators are trained in the medical field and meet HIPAA requirements.  This option allows you to delegate some of your authority to a qualified nurse—and without having to pay an additional salary.  You simply pay for the service.

You do owe your patients a great deal.  Sure, it would be nice to be “on call” 24 hours a day for their needs.  You can’t provide that on your own.  However, working with an outsourced nurse telephone triage does provide your patients with additional care.