The common practice of “curbside consultation”

Abstract

Purpose Point‐of‐care information needs for nurse practitioners are tremendous. A phenomenon often referred to as curbside consultation (CC) with colleagues is an information source for point‐of‐care clinical decision making. This literature review was conducted to describe: (a) characteristics of CC, (b) consistency of CC definition, and (c) attitudes about CC among health professionals using this information source for point‐of‐care clinical decision making. Methods This literature review includes research conducted from 1980 to 2016 concerning CC among health professionals. Data bases including PubMed, CINAHL, Google Scholar, Web of Science, PsychInfo, Business Source, and Cochrane Library were searched resulting in 15 articles for inclusion in this review. Fink's recommendations were used to assess study bias risk. Conclusions Only studies including physician samples met inclusion criteria. These studies, primarily from consultant perspectives, were conducted in varied settings and were considered highly valuable. CC s averaging 9.4 min were defined as informal advice and information‐seeking without formal consultation. Implications for practice A paucity of information exists concerning CC use among nurse practitioners. An assessment of CC processes among nurse practitioners is indicated to inform education and practice for research dissemination ultimately promoting patient care quality.

What Would it Take to get Biomedical QA Systems into Practice?

“…These inform the "mindlines" that clinicians acquire over their careers (i.e., mental models of medicine) and that are also based on other sources including guideline documents, training, background reading, and experience (Gabbay and le May, 2016). However, the information exchanged in informal consultations may be inaccurate, incomplete, and lead to practice influenced more by expert opinion than the scientific literature (Papermaster and Champion, 2017).…”

“…The demand for guidance is reflected by the fact that many questions are of the form "Should I ...?" (Del Fiol et al, 2014;Ely et al, 2000;Papermaster and Champion, 2017). Therefore, the system could respond with "study/review X suggests the following action... ".…”

DETELPROG Study. Effectiveness of a New Model of Scheduled Telephone Referral from Primary Care to Internal Medicine. A Randomised Controlled Study

“…There are several ways [6,7,8] to improve such communication, but it is telemedicine, including asynchronous consultations platforms [3,4,5,9,10,11,12,13,14,15] (e-Consultations) and real-time telephone consultations (Curbside Consultation) [16,17,18,19,20,21,22], which has opened new possibilities to health care, obtained particularly good results in the waiting times for the first consultation, decreased face-to-face specialised consultations, and increased patients and professionals’ satisfaction [3,5,11,12,16,17,23]. However, studies that provide data on the waiting times until the resolution of the problem that gave rise to the referral have not been found.…”

“…In addition, e-Consultations require important investments and institutional involvement, as well as leadership and working hours on the part of physicians [12]. With real-time telephone consultations, communication problems [15] were detected of incomplete or fragmented information [7,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,19,20,21,22,23], difficulties to choose the professional to be consulted [24], unpredictable interruptions that are time consuming, as they are not scheduled, etc. [18].…”