Telephone triage of patients with chest discomfort

This thesis focuses on describing, understanding and improving telephone triage of patients with acute chest discomfort (pain, pressure or tightness) who call out-of-hours services for primary care (OHS-PC). (i) The Netherlands Triage Standard is used for telephone triage, but it performs poorly regarding both safety and efficiency in urgency assessment of patients with or without acute coronary syndrome or other life threatening events. Triage nurses’ overruling of the system recommended urgency increases the safety of telephone triage. (ii) Triage nurses create a ‘mental image’ of the patien... Mehr ...