Articles: emergency-services.
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A survey was conducted of the telephone callers who sought advice from the accident and emergency department of a 250 bed public hospital. The aim of the one month long survey was to determine the extent of the department's telephone triage and whether there was a need for formal protocols that reflected the medical and legal responsibilities attached to giving health-related advice by telephone. ⋯ Callers were advised by the registered nurses or doctors who happened to answer the telephone and there were no guidelines and no documentation of calls. As a result of the study, the Riverina Health Service instituted telephone triage protocols for all hospitals in its area and nurses now receive inservice education about their telephone triage role and responsibilities.
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Healthc Manage Forum · Jan 1995
Development, testing and implementation of an emergency services methodology in Alberta.
Alberta was the first province in Canada to mandate reporting of hospital-based emergency services. This reporting is based on a workload measurement system that groups emergency visits into five discreet workload levels/classes driven by ICD-9-CM diagnoses. Other related workload measurement variables are incorporated, including admissions, transfers, maintenance monitoring, nursing and non-nursing patient support activities, trips, staff replacement, and personal fatigue and delay. ⋯ This would be the first time that such services would be funded on a systemic, system-wide basis whereby hospitals would be reimbursed in relation to workload. This proposed funding system would distribute available funding in a consistent, fair and equitable manner across all hospitals providing a similar set of services, thus achieving one of the key goals of the Alberta Acute Care Funding Plan. Ultimately, this proposed funding methodology would be integrated into a broader Ambulatory Care Funding system currently being developed in Alberta.