Role of the triage nurse
Tine triage nurse’s main role is the accurate prioritisation of patients, and this must be the prime objective. The triage nurse needs to become accomplished at rapid assessment — this involves quick decision making and suitable delegation of tasks. Long conversations with patients should be avoided as should exhaustive history taking. Clinical observations such as temperature/pulse, etc_ need to be delegated if they are not required to establish priority as they are too time consuming. continue reading…
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Category: Nursing Care
Patients with physical disability or learning difficulties
Apart from the extremes of age, there will be patients who have particular difficulties. These include those with special needs, poor sight, poor hearing, etc. Persons who can cope quite well in the community under controlled circumstances may have great difficulties in the strange environment of the Emergency Department. Communications again become particularly important, and it may be appropriate for such patients to be seen relatively quickly.
There is a difference between absolute clinical priority as defined using the method in this book, anti relative priority within and between triage categories. In overview the process of triage as outlined here is quite simple —patients are assigned to a triage category and then managed in order of priority mid time of attendance. However there are many other factors apart from clinical priority which may from time to time influence how the patient is handled within the Emergency Department. This chapter outlines these factors and discusses their importance. Clinical priority and the findings that determine it are dearly very important, but failure to recognize other factors can be detrimental to both departmental function and quality of care for individual patients.
A researcher spends a great deal of time refining a research idea into a testable research question. Unfortunately, the evaluator of a research study is not privy to this creative process because it occurs during the study’s conceptualization. Although this section will not teach you how to formulate a research question, it is important to provide a glimpse of what the process of developing are search question may be like for a researcher.
When nurses ask questions such as, “Why are things done this way?”, “I wonder what would happen if … ?”, “What characteristics are associated with … ?”, or “What is the effect of … on patient outcomes?”, they are often well on their way to developing a research question or hypothesis.
CHN agencies have used computers since the late 1960s, when computers were introduced into the healthcare industry. Many of the early systems focused on regulatory compliance, billing applications, and statistical reporting related to community health, which encompasses public health and home health compliance. As healthcare services continued to evolve, community health services grew primarily due to consumer choice, cost control initiatives, and the increase in numbers of healthcare recipients with chronic illnesses.
