Customer Reviews

Telephone Medicine: Triage and Training for Primary Care

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This practical and useful book is an excellent resource on training office staff on the art of telephone medicine. It will be a valuable teaching tool for students and clinicians at all levels to learn how (as Dr. Katz says) "to tame the telephone". After all, no clinician, whether MDs, NPs or PAs are able to escape using telephones in their practices. In addition, this edition is now available to the public to help patients use the phone more effectively when calling their doctor.

This revised edition expands upon its original pediatric focus to now include adult medicine. The most common symptoms of why pediatric and adult patients call their physician have been selected for the guidelines. All chapters follow the same format, thus being user-friendly for both office staff and clinicians. Practical guidelines for determining if and when a patient needs to be seen are presented clearly in all the clinical chapters.

Two other notable strengths of this well-written book are: its focus on quality improvement and its discussion on how to reduce risk of malpractice.

I showed this book to a nurse in my office, asking if she would find it useful for telephone triage. Her response was quite favorable. This is the kind of reaction that I expect would be typical for Dr. Katz's book.