Use of protocols and guidelines by telephone nurses

Changes in health care delivery, specifically the addition of telephone advice, affect how nurses work and how patients perceive care. It is important to understand the resources available to these nurses, the process by which they provide care, and patient outcomes. This descriptive study describes one type of resource, the availability and use of protocols. It also describes relationships between protocols and the quality of the nursing process and patient outcomes. Two-hundred-three taped calls to 32 advice RNs and 156 patient follow-up calls were used to measure protocol usage, nursing process quality, and patient outcomes. Although protocols were available for 78.8% of the calls, nurses varied in their extent of use (63.9% not fully used). There was a negative relationship (r = -0.395, p < 0.000) between the availability of protocols and overall quality of the nursing process. Protocol availability and use did not affect patient outcomes.