Descriptive Study of Military Health Care Beneficiaries Who Use a Nurse Staffed Health Information Telephone Service

摘要

The use of the telephone to care for patients is a rapidly growing specialty in the field of nursing. However, little is known about the patients who use these nurse staffed health information telephone services, also known as nurse advice lines. This study described military health care beneficiaries who used a nurse staffed health information telephone service. Orem's (1995) Self- Care Deficit Nursing Theory was used to guide this study. A retrospective chart audit, accompanied by the use of a computerized patient demographic system, was used to collect data about six of the ten basic conditioning factors identified by Orem (1995). When callers accessed the telephone service, the nurse would fax documentation of the calls to the patients' primary care providers. These records were gathered for data collection, along with the patient's medical record and information from the computerized database. The findings in this study described the basic conditioning factors of military health care beneficiaries who accessed the nurse staffed health information telephone service from October 1, 2000 to October 31, 2000. Fifty-one percent of callers had called for themselves and 39% had called for a child. The majority of callers were female and White. The rank of E-5 to E-7 was most represented in the calls to the telephone service. The average number of persons per household was 3.7%, and most lived in off-base housing. The majority of calls were placed between the hours of 1100 and 1200, with Thursday being the busiest day of the week for the telephone service.