“In their own voice: An approach to developing telephone triage systems”

Telephone triage is the process of evaluating whether emergency medical services are needed, at what priority, and which unit to send. This decision is based on the information provided by a caller into an emergency dispatch centre. Limited resources means that sending a priority response to one case, almost certainly means that another case would need to wait. Over-triage may result in resource wastage, while under-triage may impact patient safety. In this talk, Stassen will outline an approach that they are working on which uses multiple research approaches towards developing contextual and accurate telephone triage systems for South African emergency medical services dispatch centres. Stassen will also talk through some of the barriers and challenges to implementing telephone triage tool.

Willem Stassen
Emergency Medicine

CDP Accredited Course