Medical Emergency Communication 101: How To Handle An Emergency Call
Phone calls about medical emergencies can be difficult to manage. Here’s everything you need to know about emergency communication.
Do you know how to respond in a crisis?
One of the biggest challenges for physicians and medical clinics is handling emergency calls. There are time restraints, difficulty in communication, and often, there are also lives on the line.
In this post, we’ll tell you how to streamline your emergency communication to make these calls as easy as possible.
Make Emergency Communication Easy with these Steps
Here’s how to handle an emergency phone call with grace and efficiency.
1. Listen
The first thing to remember is to listen.
Don’t bombard the caller with questions or constantly interrupt them. Instead, listen intently.
Pay attention to their tone of voice, the speed at which they are talking, and the words they’re using. This will give you a good idea of what their circumstances are and how they’re feeling.
Many callers will be panicked. As a result, they may ramble or vent when they first get on the phone. Allow them to do so before redirecting the conversation.
2. Ask Concise Questions About Their Medical Condition
It’s important that you handle medical emergency phone calls efficiently.
This means asking the right questions in a clear, direct way. Otherwise, you will end up wasting time by repeating yourself.
When asking for any information, such as an address or details of the emergency, do it one question at a time, and confirm the information twice.
Be fully aware when the best advice is to call 911 or ask the caller to immediately head to the hospital emergency room.
3. Be Empathetic
Medical emergency callers don’t always have time to be polite. If they’re particularly flustered, they may come off rather rude. Don’t take this personally.
Remember that the caller was already upset before they started talking to you. Regardless of their manners, it’s your job to do your best to help them. Be empathetic and try to put yourself in their shoes.
4. Keep the Caller Calm
One of the most difficult things about emergency communication is remaining calm. Callers are likely to be extremely stressed, so you’ll need to calm them down.
You can do this by reminding them to breathe, speaking calmly, and asking them questions. If they get distracted or worried, you can guide them to keep the conversation on track.
5. Take Action
After you’ve gathered all of the information you need, the next step is to take action as quickly as possible.
Find out what the caller needs and make sure they get it. Whether they need emergency room help, medical advice, or simply for you to relay a message, you need to make that happen.
If English isn’t the caller’s first language, they may have trouble communicating. If this is the case, you’ll need to put them through to a translator.
Let Us Handle it for You
Emergency communication requires rigorous planning and training. Procedures need to be in place to make sure all calls are handled effectively.
You don’t have to do all of this yourself.
Instead, you can have a team of medical specialists take care of it for you.
Take the pressure off your staff by finding a medical answering service for your office.
Thanks for your medical communication advice. I wonder if there are protocols for medical professionals too. It would be interesting to see how they are taught to answer.
Thanks for the tip to ask concise questions one at a time when dealing with a medical emergency over the phone. Personally, I think it’s a good idea for all the members of your family to know how to reach emergency services. That, and having an urgent care clinic that you can go to probably isn’t a bad idea.
Thanks for explaining how people who take charge of emergency phones should help calm the caller and not take offense to what they say. It would be awful if a person was refused help because of what they said when they were panicking. I hope that all people who are behind emergency phones are like this.
That’s a good point that an answering service could help to keep the caller calm while they contact you. I could see how that would be a good way to help them stay calm so they can let you know the details of the situation as soon as you get to them. I could see that being very beneficial to doctors, so I’ll have to recommend that my brother looks into that if he decides to start his own practice.