Background/Purpose:

To evaluate the role of the rheumatology nurse advice line service and the patterns of calls for patient management in an outpatient setting.

Methods:

This is a prospective descriptive study. The rheumatology nurse advice line service is meant for addressing non-emergency queries from patients. This service is delivered through an answerphone service. Response times to the calls are kept within 24 hours. Administrative data and patient demographics (November 2013 to May 2015) were collected. The service utilization rate, purpose of call and time taken to respond to patients were also collected and analyzed to assess the demand and the benefit of this service for patients.

Results:

Forty-seven calls were received over the study duration with 79% (37) of the calls made by patients themselves. Seventy-two percent (34) of the calls made were related to clinical issues, while the rest were administrative enquiries. The top three reasons for utilizing this service were: disease-related symptoms (32%), side effect from drugs(19%), and enquiry on procedures or medications(15%). Sixty-eight percent (32) of the cases were made by patients diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis with 50% of their queries pertaining to disease flare and side effects related to immunosuppressive therapy. The mean time taken to respond to a patient’s enquiry was 527 min / 8 hours 47 min.

Conclusion:

These results suggest that there is a need for clinical advice pertaining to disease flares and medication side effects as provided by the rheumatology nurse advice line in the management of rheumatoid arthritis patients in an outpatient setting. These interventions may play a significant role in encouraging adherence to therapy, prevent major flares, promote self-management in patients, and improve patient satisfaction. We plan to study the relationship between availability of the rheumatology nurse advice line with management of mild disease flare and adherence to medications.

The current uptake is low as the RNA is a new service and recruitment was not open to all patients. To improve the uptake, we plan to allow access to all patients and increase the awareness of this advice line of referring physicians.

« Back to 2015 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting

ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/rheumatology-nurse-advice-line-in-singapore-tertiary-hospital-pilot-study/