Using an Academic-Practice Partnership to Develop a Telephone Triage Education Module

Background/purpose: Telehealth is an important part of care delivery in the ambulatory care setting. One subset of telehealth is telephone triage. Telephone triage requires a specialized skillset to deliver safe care that is evidence based. Nurses who are new to the ambulatory care setting may not have the training and skill set to safely perform telephone triage. Also, undergraduate nursing students often lack exposure to concepts and content related to ambulatory care and telephone triage in their nursing programs. Academic-practice partnerships are collaborations between schools of nursing and practice settings that provide a mutual benefit to the practice setting and the school of nursing. The purpose of this presentation is to describe how school of nursing faculty and VA nurses in a veteran affairs nursing academic-practice partnership (VANAP) identified a knowledge gap in nurses and nursing students and collaborated to develop a telephone triage learning module to support the learning needs of new nurses as well as undergraduate nursing students.

Description: VANAP faculty recognized the need to better support undergraduate nursing students who had clinical placements in the ambulatory care setting, especially related to telephone triage. At the same time, VA nurses reported hiring nurses who were inexperienced in telephone triage. There was no formalized way to prepare nursing students or new nurse hires in skills such as telephone triage. VANAP faculty and VA nurses conducted a needs assessment to identify the most important concepts and content related to telephone triage. VANAP faculty and VA nurses met weekly to refine essential content that nurses would need to know to safely practice telephone triage.

Outcome: The training module will be used for new nurses hired into ambulatory care settings throughout the VA medical center as well as undergraduate nursing students in clinical rotations in ambulatory care settings at the VA. This presentation highlights the importance of collaboration between academic and practice settings to support students as well as nurses in ambulatory care practice. By leveraging the clinical expertise of the nurses and the educational expertise of faculty, a learning module was created to meet the needs of both new nurse hires and undergraduate nursing doing clinical rotations in the ambulatory care setting. Supporting new hires in their role and exposing undergraduate nursing students to primary care and equipping them with ambulatory care-specific skills can help prepare nurses and nursing students for successful careers in ambulatory care settings.