Venue: Tavistock Centre, London
Triage is used increasingly in the NHS as a way of filtering and classifying the demand from patients to see a health care professional; in an ever more technically proficient service, the need to clarify the patient's request is essential and it is the job of the clinician to make this first decisive input to patient management.
Triage can occur in several settings (eg the newly appointed ‘Meet and Greet’ nurse positioned in A&E) but crucially for doctors it occurs more and more in the Out of Hours service where primary care doctors working shifts will be positioned in a ‘base’ to take all incoming telephone calls from patients requesting emergency medical care. These doctors must then ‘triage’ calls into categories of severity; those needing to be seen will either be visited by a mobile doctor whilst others can arrange to get themselves to the base, and others can be managed with telephone advice only.
Such is the arrangement for almost all the Out of Hours services now in England and Wales, so it is critically important that doctors and practice nurses have, in addition to the clinical skills, the specific communication skills needed to tease out the serious from the trivial, to sort out who needs to be seen to clarify the clinical situation and who can be managed over the phone until the normal service is available again.
It is to improve these triage skills that this course is being run by the Adult Directorate at the Tavistock Clinic.
New dates for this course will be advertised shortly. If you are interested in participating and/or receiving further details, please contact:
Vicky Harrison
020 8938 2548
events@tavi-port.org
