Nurse demand management, aims to respond, within the scope of the nursing profession, to people who go to a primary care centre with a health problem that requires special attention. This clinical activity must be differentiated from the nurse triage in the emergency services, which offers: reception, attendance and classification of the problem, without any further clinical activity.
In 2005, the Primary Care Center Can Bou in Castelldefels, near Barcelona, launched a pioneering experience in nurse demand management and subsequently prepared a "Guide to nursing interventions" with the following groups’ classification:
- The health problems where the formalization allows the nurses to be the ones who finalize the clinical process and therefore they themselves are responsible for the reception of patients and resolution of health problems.
- Problems of possible emergency intervention in which nurses are autonomous only in the first part of the algorithm. After, there’s a protocol point where the doctor intervenes.
- Health problems requiring an initial assessment of severity by the nurse prior to the doctor’s intervention.
