Nurse telephone-triage

Abstract

Being ill does not always coincide with daytime primary-care hours. Worried patients call a doctor out-of-hours or an ambulance, or even turn up at accident and emergency departments, when some reassuring advice was all that was required. Such advice might well come from a nurse rather than from a doctor, and indeed nurse telephone-triage lines have been running for over 10 years (see Lancet commentary, 1999; 354: 88–89). The nurses who answer the phones are specially trained and use algorithms on computers to steer the conversation to a particular conclusion.