Thursday, February 21, 2019


What Makes a Successful Telephone Triage Nurse?
 I  recently started to ponder on our company and the nurses here who are successful, both present and past, and decided to share some insight on what has contributed to this success.
Technology
This is probably the first and one of the most important things that the telephone triage nurse should be adept at. Many of us grew up before there were computers or when computers were new on the scene. I will tell my age and say I remember typing classes in high school, not computer pals that they offer to preschoolers now.
However, 99% of what we do as telephone triage nurses is computer based. So, how do you become more efficient with computers? Take a computer class is one suggestion, but there are so many things on line you can do in your spare time as well. There are free typing tests you can do where you practice typing as you listen to recordings. Spend time just playing with your keyboard and learning what each key does or open a blank word document and practice hitting each tab to learn what its function is. If you get an error or cannot figure out how to fix something, google is an excellent teacher. There is a you tube video now for any computer issue you can think of. Trust me, I have looked. I remember when a clerical person at a former employer was once teaching me how to use a computer. Her words were “You are not going to blow it up. Whatever button you hit wrong, it is fixable.” Once I got over that fear, then I began to teach myself when issues came along.
Technology is just what we must be able to overcome in this position, and to be successful, you must motivate yourself to learn more to be able to do more.
Translate
The successful nurse must be able to translate bedside nursing and office competence over the phone easily. This is not a universal gift. For some nurses, it comes naturally, and others must work to improve it. It takes skill to be able to talk with callers with confidence, exhibit compassion, all while really listening to their concerns and giving them adequate advice and adhering to the protocols. This takes hours of practice and reviewing of the protocols. Teachers do not walk in to the classroom with little education and training, and effectively deliver their lesson plans to their students.
Tact
Webster’s Dictionary defines tactful as “careful not to upset or offend anyone”. This is just good customer service. The nurse that is successful in telephone triage thinks about their choice of words before they speak. After all, that is what we do, we spend a lot of time talking with callers who cannot see our faces or read our body language. We are speaking with callers who are anxious, upset or sick, and their emotions are running high. Even though we may not mean to be offensive or condescending to callers, one word can be easily taken out of context by them.
It has been said to put a mirror up where you can see your facial expressions while you are on the phone, and customers can hear you smile. Test it. It is true. Smiling on the phone radiates through to the callers.
Truthful
Be open to your callers. Give them honest, sound advice, and if their symptoms are concerning, it is OK to say, “what you are saying concerns me, and this is why.”. You do not want to diagnose, but you want to educate them enough so that they will comply with the advice you are giving them. If you have a life experience that you are comfortable sharing with the caller, and you think would be beneficial to them, there is nothing wrong with sharing it. A mentor used the analogy of speaking with a young woman who had recently suffered a miscarriage and was not dealing well with it. The caller went on to tell the nurse that she could not know how she was feeling. However, this nurse could relate to her as she had experienced the same heart break in the past herself. The nurse shared her experience with this caller and was able to direct her to the appropriate next level as the caller could relate to her.
Triage
Webster’s defines triage as the sorting according to the urgency of their needs of care. Telephone triage nurses must think in this mindset to be successful. This environment is the same as a virtual emergency room. The queue is your patients waiting, and you must look at their complaints to see who needs to be “seen” first, and who can wait.
We have some of the most compassionate, caring nurses on the planet. However, compassion alone does not make a great triage nurse. Think back to your last experience in the ED, whether it before for you or a family member. A nurse performed a brief assessment of the complaint and decided how important it was for you to be taken to a room right away. This is what we, as telephone triage nurses should be doing consistently…scanning the queue with every call to see what calls look urgent and which ones can wait.
We know the plan in the ED is to get as many patients through in a day while providing efficient, safe and compassionate care. Our virtual ED here is the same. We want to provide callers with great care, but at the same time, we must be mindful of all the others waiting. So, efficiency is a priority to be successful.
So, what about those that come to the ED that really don’t need to be there, and should be calling their provider’s office the next am? We could compare that to callers that are requesting non-urgent medications, looking for test results, or just need advice on things that can be managed at home. Those take last priority, and if they came to ED, they would be advised to call their provider the next morning. That is how they should be handled here, unless they get angry or there are different directions on the profile. Many callers need to be trained that unless it is urgent, they need to be calling during office hours.
With training the caller, there comes responsibility. Back to the ED scenario, if you needed an RX sent to a pharmacy, would the ED nurse look up hours of pharmacies nearest your home for you? No. They would ask you what pharmacy, and that would be it. When you leave the ED, they give you a list of instructions to follow and what to do if….  They do not call you later to check on you and to see if you have following their instructions. They place that responsibility on you.  An efficient telephone triage nurse does the same, educates the caller and empowers them with the knowledge they need. While it would be nice to follow up with callers, our patients in our virtual ED would just not get moved through so more patients can be “seen”, if that were the case.
Telephone triage is essentially practicing emergency room nursing over the phone and requires skill. Not just with patient assessment, but it requires multitasking, shifting perspectives, being confident in the decisions you make and the advice you give, all while being able to quickly move callers through the virtual ED so you can provide the same care to the next patient that needs you.

7 comments:

  1. It was during my research on HIV/Herpes that I stumbled upon the Hiv/Herpes information; information which is quite easy to find when doing a search for STD on google. I was into conspiracy at the time thought of HIV/Herpes Cured' being a conspiracy was something Ignorance though,I found pretty interesting about herbal medicine. I asked questions about the Herbal cure's on official HIV/Herpes websites and I was banned for doing so by moderators who told me that I was parroting Hiv/Herpes propaganda. This reinforced my belief that there is a cure for Hiv/Herpes Then i found a lady from germany name Achima Abelard Dr Itua Cure her Hiv so I send him a mail about my situation then talk more about it and send me his herbal medicine I drank for two weeks.And today I'm Cured no Hiv/Herpes in my life,I searched for Hiv/Herpes groups to attempt to make contact with people in order to learn more about Hiv/Herpes Herbal Cure's I believed at this time that you with the same disease this information is helpful to you and I wanted to do the best I could to spread this information in the hopes of helping other people.That Dr Itua Herbal Medicine makes me believes there is a hope for people suffering from,Parkinson's,Alzheimer’s disease,Bechet’s disease,Crohn’s disease
    ,Cushing’s disease,Heart failure,Multiple Sclerosis,Hypertension,Colo_Rectal Cancer,Lyme Disease,Blood Cancer,Brain Cancer,Breast Cancer,Lung Cancer,Kidney Cancer,Love Spell,psoriasis,Lottery Spell,disease,Schizophrenia,Cancer,Scoliosis,Fibromyalgia,Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Syndrome Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva.Infertility,Tach Disease ,Epilepsy ,Diabetes ,Coeliac disease,,Arthritis,Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis,Autism,Alzheimer's disease,Adrenocortical carcinoma.Asthma, (measles, tetanus, whooping cough, tuberculosis, polio and diphtheria)Allergic diseases.Parkinson's disease,Schizophrenia,Lung Cancer,Breast Cancer,Colo-Rectal Cancer,Blood Cancer,Prostate Cancer,siva.Fatal Familial Insomnia Factor V Leiden Mutation ,Epilepsy Dupuytren's disease,Desmoplastic small-round-cell tumor Diabetes ,Coeliac disease,Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease,Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy, Ataxia,Arthritis,Amyotrophic Lateral Scoliosis,Fibromyalgia,Fluoroquinolone Toxicity
    Syndrome Fibrodysplasia Ossificans ProgresSclerosis,Seizures,Alzheimer's disease,Adrenocortical carcinoma.Asthma,Allergic diseases.Hiv_ Aids,Herpe ,Copd,Glaucoma., Cataracts,Macular degeneration,Cardiovascular disease,Lung disease.Enlarged prostate,Osteoporosis.
    Dementia.,Hiv_ Aids,Herpes,Inflammatory bowel disease ,Copd,Diabetes,Hepatitis,I read about him online how he cure Tasha and Tara,Conley,Mckinney and many more suffring from all kind of disease so i contacted him . He's a herbal doctor with a unique heart of God, Contact Emal..info@drituaherbalcenter.com / drituaherbalcenter@gmail.com Phone or whatsapp..+2348149277967.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My husband was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's disease at 68. His symptoms were shuffling of feet, slurred speech, low volume speech, degradation of hand writing, horrible driving skills, right arm held at 45 degree angle. Things were tough for me, I too was diagnosed of COPD but now we both finally free from these diseases with the help of total cure herbal foundation, He now walks properly and all symptoms has reversed. He had trouble with balance especially at night, getting into the shower and exiting it is difficult. Getting into bed is also another thing he finds impossible. We had to find a better solution for his condition which has really helped him a lot,The biggest helped we had was totalcureherbsfoundation. com They walked us through the proper steps, im highly recommending this herbal formula to anyone who needs help.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I found out, that taking herbal treatment is the best to get rid of hpv as soon as i feel the symptoms of hpv is appearing, i took the healing process by contacting Dr Oyagu for natural treatment it works wonders, amazingly ever since I had the herbal treatment i have not feel these horrible disease anymore and my doc told me the virus is gone, i am glad i finally got cured out from this horrible disease. every hpv or herpes patients should also get in touch with this herbalist Dr Oyagu to get ride of these disease forever his email address: oyaguspellcaster@gmail.com or wahtsapp +2348101755322 thank you.....

    ReplyDelete
  4. HOW I GOT CURED OF HERPES DISEASE
    I'm here to testify about what DR. OSO did for me. I have been suffering from (HERPES) disease for the past 5 years and had constant pain,especially inside my body. During the first year,I had faith in God that i would be healed someday. This disease started circulating all over my body and i have been taking treatment from my doctor, few weeks ago i came across a testimony of one lady on the internet testifying about a Man called DR. OSO on how he cured her from herpes disease. And she also gave the email address of this man and advise anybody to contact him for help for any kind of sickness that he would be of help.so I emailed him telling him about my (HERPES) he told me not to worry that i was going to be cured!! Well i never believed it,, well after all the procedures and remedy given to me by this man few weeks later i started experiencing changes all over me as DR. OSO assured me that i will be cured,after some time. i went to my doctor to confirmed if i have be finally healed behold it was TRUE,the test came out negative. So friends my advise is if you have such sickness or any other at all you can contact DR. OSO for help.
    Email} drosohaberhome@gmail.com 

    WhatsApp /call +2348162084839   

    https://sites.google.com/view/drosohaberhome/

    His blog pagehttps://drosohaberhome.blogspot.com  

      https://www.facebook.com/drosoherbalhome/ 
     
    you can also email me for more information about DR oso via smithmorgan2777@gmail.com ALL THANK TO DR OSO .  

    ReplyDelete
  5. HERPES CURE IS REAL:
    Indeed Doctor Disu has a cure for Herpes Virus, I was once victim of the herpes virus with many epidemics on my body, I was cured of the virus thanks to the help of Doctor Disu herbal medicine. I have met most of his patient testimonials on blogs and social media pages, cured of various illnesses. I contacted him with his email address to which he replied and asked me a few questions and the preparation method for which I paid, he sent me herbal medicines and with his prescription I drank herbal medicine for 21 days and the epidemics on my body were healed after concluding herbal medicine, I went for the test and my result was negative with no trace of virus in my blood. You can also be cured, contact him on his official email; africanherbalcure@gmail.com or WhatsApp him on +2348167485904.

    He said he had an herbal remedy for
    Diabetes, cancer, PENIS ENLARGMENT, UTI
    heart disease and liver disease and many more.
    website: https://drdisuafricanherbalcure.weebly.com

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hello everyone, I was infected with the herpes virus and I got cured of the herpes virus few months ago after i contacted Dr NICOLAS. I saw a post on the internet after i have seek healing for several years from different doctors in California. I sent the Doctor a request for help, just a few email i followed his instruction and he sent me the medication after i paid him. Now i am negative and i referred him to all my friend who had this same sickness and they have gotten their cure too. You can contact him via his email: drnicolasherbelhome@gmail.com
    Call/WhatsApp: +2348158577976

    ReplyDelete
  7. Cartes ATM programmées
    Savez-vous que vous pouvez pirater n'importe quel guichet automatique !!!
    Nous avons des guichets automatiques spécialement programmés qui peuvent être utilisés pour retirer de l'argent dans les guichets automatiques, les magasins et les points de vente. Nous vendons ces cartes à tous nos clients et acheteurs intéressés dans le monde entier, les cartes ont une limite de retrait chaque semaine.
    Devenir riche et vivre le style de vie riche et célèbre est un rêve pour beaucoup de gens. Et tandis que la plupart des gens vont au travail ou recherchent d'autres méthodes éthiques pour gagner de l'argent avec des cartes programmées par guichet automatique.
    Les guichets automatiques programmés retirent de l'argent de chaque guichet automatique mais ont une limite de retrait chaque semaine, seul votre code PIN s'y trouve, c'est un système de carte de haute technologie. La carte ATM PROGRAMMÉE fonctionne sur tous les guichets automatiques à carte, partout dans le monde.
    Courriel : atmservices44@aol.com
    Courriel : hacklords.investors@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete