Telephone nursing consultation can serve as a easily- assessed tool to provide people with knowledge of preventive medicine.discharged patients / families get the same period of medical care during the hospital care environment and the treatment of health problems in the pipeline. The purpose of this study is to understand the general situation of 24-hour telephone nursing consultation services for people and patients and to analyze the results of hospitalization and emergency department revisit in 3 days and readmission in 14 days.
Methods:
24 hours telephone nursing consultation was implemented from January 1st to December 31 th 2016 in a medical center in central Taiwan. These consultations were provided by three experienced nurses on duty (one in charge each shift),we retrospectively analyzed the service amount of our telephone nursing consultation and the need of medical attention from outpatients and explored the association with emergency department revisit in 3 days and readmission in 14 days. A total of 22,439 telephone nursing consultation services were provided in 2016 in our hospital and we analyzed 2,938 telephone nursing data after excluding incomplete records.
Results:
We found the amount of telephone nursing consultation was Day shift 62.8% and women 53.5% callers are predominant. The percentage of people aged between 41-60 were 35.2%. 49.2% of the consultation was about medical services, 28.8% was about outpatient department and 16.1% was about discharge plan.Most asked medical department was orthopedic department 16.1%, followed by neurologic department 11.7%, 96.9% of the consultation was provided with construction from nursing staff. The percentage of emergency department revisit in 3 days was 7.9% and 20.8% for readmission in 14 days.
Conclusion:
The result revealed the general satisfaction of patients been provided with telephone nursing consultation. The association of reduction of emergency department revisit in 3 days and readmission in 14 days still need further prospective study to explored.