Ricardo De Sousa Peixoto¹*, Bansri K Lakhani², Yuanchao Xue³, Anthony J King², Harminder S Dua² and Dalia G Said²

¹University Hospitals Derby and Burton, Derby, UK
²Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Nottingham University Hospitals, Nottingham, UK
³Nottingham University Hospitals, Nottingham, UK

*Corresponding Author: Ricardo De Sousa Peixoto, University Hospitals Derby and Burton, Derby, UK.

Received: August 25, 2021; Published: September 16, 2021

  The recent COVID-19 pandemic led the UK government to issue guidelines on social distancing and home confinement. In accordance with the Royal College of Ophthalmologists guidance on the management of services during the pandemic [1], our unit halted all routine clinical activity and restricted emergency access services. Nottingham University Hospitals trust (NUH) has the largest tertiary walk in eye casualty centre in the East Midlands with 24 hour on-call cover. Following lockdown, all walk-ins to eye casualty were stopped and patients were encouraged to self-refer via a new phone triage system aiming to prioritise patients with acute symptoms who needed face to face review and providing verbal advice over the telephone where possible. Walk-in patients were triaged in the same manner and only selected patients were admitted to the department. Both phone and presential triage were carried out following an existing risk assessment triage tool developed for eye casualty.

References

1. RCOPhth guidelines on management of ophthalmology services following COVID-19 pandemic (2020).

Citation

Citation: Ricardo De Sousa Peixoto., et al. “Phone Triage System is an Effective and Safe Way to Manage Patients in Eye Casualty during the COVID-19 Lockdown".Acta Scientific Ophthalmology 4.10 (2021): 19-20.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2021 Ricardo De Sousa Peixoto., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.