POPOVER_ACCOUNT_GENERAL_ABOUT

Since the introduction of the telephone by Thomas Bell in 1876 patients have been able to call a doctor or nurse for a medical problem from almost anywhere in the world. To determine the urgency of a medical problem the call handler will do a triage. The word triage is derived from the French word «trier» what means «to sort». The original meaning of triage was prioritization of victims of war. Its principle was introduced by Doctor Larrey, a French surgeon who worked for Napoleon as one of his court physicians.

To do a triage by phone the call handler should not only have good communication skills but should also know which questions are to be asked and the relevance of the answers received. One of the major risks, not only in medicine but also in jurisprudence or police work, is the development of a tunnel vision, meaning that a hypothesis becomes the final outcome whatever the facts are. In telephone triage this can happen if the call handler decides too early what to advice without considering different causes of a clinical situation.

This book RED FLAGS is written to avoid a tunnel vision and the use of the question sets will support doctors and nurses to do a safe telephone triage.

Hay DERKX, MD, PhD