Telephone medicine in LTC

From this months JAMDA.This article discusses the fact that nurses and physicians appreciate different aspects of telephone medicine in LTC. From two focus groups the researchers made the following QI recomendations

1) better nursing assessment and provision of patient information
2) minimization of nonurgent calls after hours
3) more decisive physician action (or explanation of inaction)
4) better physician familiarity with facility policies/logistics
5) better communication/paging system.

Considering how many care decisions are made over the phone this study should be broadly distributed and read!

Inter-disciplinary Focus Groups on Telephone Medicine: A Quality Improvement Initiative