Publications

Hospital 'Rapid Response Teams' Save Lives

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 1, 2004) focused on an innovative strategy some hospitals are adopting to save lives of critically ill patients — a SWAT team approach to intervening when a patient's condition suddenly becomes critical.

Signaled by a pager, Rapid Response Teams can be at patient's side in moments, usually much more quickly than when a "code" is called. Teams may include a critical care nurse, intensive care specialist and a respiratory therapist. Delays in calling codes are caused by several factors: staff may wait until the patient's primary care provider is contacted or they may not consider a situation critical until it is too late.

While codes signify an emergency situation, the Rapid Response Team approach is to prevent codes and other medical crises from happening in the first place ("rescue rather than resuscitate").

Australia introduced the Rapid Response Team concept to health care. Earlier this year an Australian medical journal published results of a clinical trial in which there was a 50 percent drop in adverse events and a 36.9 percent reduction in the post-operative hospital mortality rate at a medical center that had begun using such a team.

The study, reported in the Medical Journal of Australia, compared "before team" and "after team" numbers and found:

  • Cardiac arrests dropped from 63 to 22;
  • Deaths from cardiac arrests dropped from 37 to 16;
  • Days in the ICU after cardiac arrest dropped from 163 to 33;
  • Days in the hospital after cardiac arrest dropped from 1,353 to 159;
  • Inpatient deaths dropped from 302 to 222.

Implementation of Rapid Response Teams could have a significant impact on patient outcomes in this country.

A study by HealthGrades Inc. found that one in four Medicare patients who experienced a "patient safety incident" died.

Two-thirds of that total — 187,289 deaths — were associated with "failure to rescue."

AFSCME nurses should be aware of this development and work to ensure that our members' expertise is tapped.

Print Version