The telenursing service deals with offering the public guidance as what to do with their health and illness concern. More specifically this service includes triage, support, advice, education, referral, information and coordination. To conduct telephone advice is a complicated task to perform and put specific demands of the nurse’s communication skills.

The purpose of this study was to critically review the impact of telephone counseling focused on context of implementation, perspective, design and clinical relevance by a sample of studies within the field.

The critical review focused on inconsistencies in the material. Strengths and weaknesses of the studies were explored, with emphasis on detecting areas of skill gaps.

Twelve of thirteen studies were made in the context of telenursing. The thirteenth was conducted in the context of the emergency call. The most prominent approach was the study of callers´. Two of the articles were made with an inductive design, five with a deductive and the remaining six articles with a mixed design. The clinical relevance is attached to the callers´ perspective. The most salient dimension of the analyzed studies were studies of callers´ satisfaction with telephone advice, compliance to advice given and experiences of approaching a telenurse. The results reveal that when given advice are understood, satisfaction with the advice is obtained as well as good compliance and the caller feel looked after. However, the callers´ experience to ventilate their concerns, being listened to, while having "control" over the call is less explored. Moreover, the callers´ experience of being subject to advice by telephone seems to be further explored.