If a patient calls with a complaint of pain, he or she will first get the person who carries out the triage on the phone. During the day this is usually the desk assistant of the practice, but in the evening or at the weekend the dentist on duty, a dental assistant or the employee of a triage center carries out the triage.
Listen carefully and ask questions to determine urgency
Whoever carries out the triage, there is no question that it must be done carefully. In order to make a good assessment of the urgency of the care demand, it is essential that you listen carefully and ask further questions, but also that you pay attention to emotions.
You can use these sample questions as a guideline:
- Does the patient call himself or does someone else call for him? In the latter case: can the patient answer the phone himself and if not, why not?
- What exactly is going on?
- How long have the complaints existed, are there also other complaints?
- What is the course of the complaint(s): is there aggravation or reduction?
- Are there any certain conditions, is the patient taking medication? Think of anticoagulant medication in case of bleeding.
- Has the patient already taken pain medication to reduce the complaints and if so, which one and in what dosage?
- Is the patient worried and what does he expect from the conversation?
Pain Assessment with Numeric Rating Scale
Assessing a pain complaint is always difficult. Pain perception simply cannot be measured objectively and unambiguously. A practical tool for determining how much pain a patient is experiencing over the phone is the Numeric Rating Scale (NRS):
| 0 | no pain | no hindrance in activities |
| 1-2 | mild pain | little or no hindrance in activities |
| 3-4 | mild pain | any hindrance in activities |
| 5-6 | moderate pain | moderate impairment in activities |
| 7-8 | severe pain | severe impairment in activities |
| 9-10 | unbearable pain | all dominating, hindrance in all activities |
Triage guide with schedule
The triage manual with the handy triage schedule from the Emergency Response Practice Guideline helps you to ask the right questions and thus quickly assess whether there is an emergency or not. Share and discuss the manual and schedule with your team and put it by the phone. Are you a member of the KNMT? Then you will find the triage manual, the schedule and the other tools to properly arrange emergency care at knmt.nl/spoed.
To the member resources
Open the KNMT Practice Guideline Reception of dental emergencies