Standardizing Telephone Triage Protocol

Lily H. Chan

Abstract

The objective for my project is to increase nurse satisfaction by implementing a protocol in the ambulatory care setting to standardize nursing assessment and documentation in telephone triage management. The goal is to achieve 90% compliance to the new process 3 months after the adoption and achieve 85% nurse satisfaction by February 2017. I implemented the new workflow by applying Lewin’s Change Theory. My project included teaching and education with a choice of a short 2-hour in-person training session, or an interactive online teaching module. A 7-question survey was distributed through MonkeySurvey.com, an online survey tool, to evaluate nurse satisfaction with the newly implemented workflow. The survey result showed 71.47% satisfaction, which is 8.4% below the project goal. Compliance was drawn from chart audits of telephone triages from October 2016 to November 2016. The result showed 80% compliance, which is 8.8% below goal. Nurse satisfaction is a broad subject involving many variables it may be difficult to achieve a score of 85% with a subjective matter on a newly implemented workflow. In future evaluations, nurse interviews for qualitative information may be helpful to understand the cause of inconsistent use of the protocol and nurse dissatisfaction. Also, having baseline information may have changed the approach to implementing the intervention.