Interventions to Improve Response Time to Nurse Triage Phone Calls in a Tertiary Care Pediatric Otolaryngology Practice.

Importance: Delay in response for telephone triage calls that need clinician input for resolution can result in delay of care and unintended frustration for patients and families. It can be a challenge to manage calls in a high-volume pediatric otolaryngology practice.

Objective: To improve the percentage of nurse triage clinically relevant phone calls returned within 2 hours to parents or caregivers.

Design, Setting, and Participants: This was a quality-improvement study of a tertiary care pediatric otolaryngology practice with more than 32 000 clinic visits and more than 9000 surgical patients per year.

Interventions: In 2014, a collaborative team was created at our center to determine the optimal time for triage callback to families and to define an optimal process that would allow more rapid response time for calls that the triage nurses needed to escalate to the patient's managing surgeon. Several plan-do-study-act cycles were performed to optimize the process. The utilization of advanced practice nurses as an intermediary step was crucial in allowing a more efficient flow of communication.

Main Outcomes and Measures: Percentage of triage phone calls returned within 2-hour time frame.

Results: Over 40 months, 4839 clinically relevant phone calls occurred, averaging 128 calls per month. The baseline mean was 101 calls per month, and the postintervention mean was 130 calls per month. Prior to this project, only 42% of calls were being addressed within 2 hours. After our interventions, the average time for caregiver callback within 2 hours decreased from 15.3 hours preintervention to 3.9 hours postintervention. In addition, caregivers received clinician callback within 2.0 hours 76.7% of the time postintervention compared with 42.0% with a baseline shift (difference probability between preintervention and postintervention, 0.21; 95% CI, 0.15-0.27). Outcomes were sustained for 3 years and continue to be monitored.

Conclusions and Relevance: The most effective intervention was using advanced practice nurses to efficiently resolve patient triage concerns that were outside the scope of practice of the registered nurse. By establishing clear pathways of communication and standardized education among our team, we successfully improved our processes, which resulted in more optimal care for our patients.