Why Tele-triage nursing is important for modern nursing

Tele-triage is a process by which nurses interact with clients over the telephone to identify nature and urgency of a patient’s healthcare needs. It came about after nurses ventured into the use of technology adding into the traditional triage nursing that nurses been providing in hospitals for a long time. Traditional triage nursing is the assessment of a patient’s condition and any changes to determine the priority of admission to an Emergency Room as well as receiving treatment.

Triage nurses deal with providing care to individuals who get injuries or sickness in emergency situations such as accidents, bombing, war or building collapses. They work at the scene, in ambulances transporting the patients and in emergency rooms. >

The difference in the-triage nursing is that nurses interact with their patients over the phone. Some people refer to this practice as Telehealth nursing. The nurse answers to health questions by clients over the phone and at the same time use the information they provide during the interaction to determine the kind of healthcare they need. Nurses providing triage-nursing have received training on the specific questions they should ask patient to enable them to assess their health situation and refer them to the proper healthcare providers rather than an emergency room or a clinic unless the situation is dire. Telephone Triage Nurses can consult patient health information and chart online so as to provide more specific and better quality information.>

A table-triage nurse performs these roles:>

Nurses in the specialty now use modern technologies such as the internet, digital assessment tools, and telemonitoring equipment.

After the first consultancy, the-triage nurses use modern technologies to continue assessing, planning, intervening and evaluating the outcome of nursing care. Due to expanding the use of telephone and other technologies in health care services, practitioners now use the term telehealth to capture the breadth of the services.

Benefits of the-triage nursing to patients

Benefits to healthcare system

Tele-triage nursing has many benefits to the healthcare system in general in the following ways:

Minimizes cost

Telehealth helps to reduce ambulance, and medical taxi cost as patients can consult from their homes for diagnosis and advice on how to address the medical problem. It also eliminates unnecessary tests that require much accuracy after transferring patients to another site. It also reduces the cost of admission and readmission when a patient moves from one facility to another. Healthcare industry loses billions of dollars on unnecessary hospitalizations but nursing facilities that invest in telehealth record significant savings.

Provides an option to reduce staff

Telehealth provides smalls healthcare facilities especially in the rural regions with an opportunity to reduce their manpower. With technology, they can rely on a support network made up several hospitals and clinics to provide consultancy to a high number of clients using technology. It reduces the number of hospitalizations and bed days creating an opportunity to reduce staff. Even in the instances where the staff number stays intact, telehealth still improves communication between the regional facilities.

Tele-triage nursing increases the attractiveness of the small rural facilities to the medical professionals. They interact with various patients over the phone and other methods of technology making them feel that they are fully utilizing their knowledge. They do not have to move to larger facilities to utilize their skills.

Benefits to the doctors

Many practice settings have embraced tele-triage nursing as an integral mode of providing healthcare services especially during off hours, national and international holidays. These include an emergency department, primary care, general practice, managed care and pediatric practice. It is worth a try for patients, nurses, and doctors.