Telephone Triage for Stroke by Ambulance Services in the U.K.

Ambulance dispatch centers in the U.K. use a software program developed and used in the U.S. that leads call center staff through a structured interview about the patient’s symptoms. At the end of the interview, the patient is assigned a chief complaint and a corresponding ambulance response priority category — A: life threatening, requiring an 8-minute ambulance response time; B: urgent, requiring a 19-minute response time; or C: nonurgent, requiring a 60-minute response time. Call center staff generally have no medical background and receive 20 hours of instruction before beginning dispatch work. To assess the accuracy of this system for identifying patients with acute stroke, researchers retrospectively compared assigned chief complaints…