Rapid response teams

Introduction

The recent study has shown that there is increased in-hospital mortality. It got contributed by failing to rescue a deteriorating patient. Inadequate planning and communication and failure to notice the deteriorating patient condition is the overall reason patients get rescued late. Unnecessary death prevention is possible if symptoms get identified earlier. However, it is always not possible without a round-the-clock surveillance of the patient. The Rapid Response Team is a team of medical professionals and especially clinicians who convey their critical care skills to the patient bedside or wherever it gets required. The team offers the surveillance that is required to notice a deteriorating patient before they succumb to death or suffer cardiac arrest.

Implementing Rapid Response Teams

There is rapid growth in the literature surrounding implementation and operation of Rapid Response Teams. Therefore, hospitals do not just go into implementing the response teams. It is the pool of literature that they consult before reaching a decision on whether to implement and how it should get implemented. The literature offers an overwhelming positive recommendation to the implementation of Rapid Response Teams. However, many hospitals refrain from taking the first step owing to the changes and effects that they will undergo. Most of the changes and effects associated with the implementation of Rapid Response Teams are financial and infrastructural changes. It looks as though rapid response teams can get implemented to a hospital seamlessly, but that is not the case. It is a process that calls for sacrifice, planning, and careful execution lest it becomes unsuccessful (Jones, DeVita, & Bellomo, 2011)

Changes in staff and organization

There are many logistics, political, social, and medical challenges associated with the introduction and implementation of Rapid Response Team. Before implementation, careful consideration and a coordinated strategy are required. It is one way of guaranteeing success. There are few chances of a rapid response system succeeding if it does not have the support of leaders including nurses and executive medical personnel. A long time is required to offer explanation surrounding the notion of rapid response system and gain enough support for adoption. The emphasis needs to be on the role of the rapid response system. It should get noted that a Rapid Response Team provides a quick opinion on the patient’s deteriorating health rather than taking full care of the patient. Before the formation, such a team needs adequate resources that will sustain it for as long as it will operate. The resources should be in terms of both equipment and personnel. Having all these will enable them manage critical care event (Lin, 2008)

Rapid Response Team might be a new phenomenon to the most staff at the hospital. The rapid response system afferent limb will need regular education for the hospital ward staff. There is a likeliness of system failure where such support has not gotten guaranteed. Additionally, the education of the staff should not be a one-off thing; it needs to get continuous, and in-training carried out as well. It is to prevent seeing the staff operate superbly well in the first days of implementation but lose sharpness as time move. Furthermore, a physician will need an appointment as the team leader. The purpose is for the physician to help organize and coordinate transfers of patients into the ICU (Vincent, 2008)

Good performance training gives a certainty that patient intervention will be safe and effective. Training will not be possible without some practical. Simulation is the best way to do it. Simulation training will see the increase in performance of the rapid response system because they will have the ability to see how the effects on the patient outcomes will turn out. More so, a simulation testing allows management of patient’s condition deterioration by structured approach. All the changes and implementations will get followed by frequent audits that will evaluate the reasons for activations and low output of the system and offer guidelines for quality improving (Hillman, Bellomo, & DeVita, 2010)

Barriers to Rapid Response Team implementation

A major hindrance to implementation is the cost of the system. There is no cost analysis to see how much it will cost a hospital for the entire time the system will remain in operation. The cost of system implementation could get reduced by sharing duties with the current code team and only limiting their services to patients who are critically ill.

There is an argument that once implemented; a rapid response system would cause diversion of critical care nurses from their duties and leave their ICU patients at risk. It has already gotten known that a rapid response system requires adequate resources to fulfill their purpose. The current team will get replaced by a team that has these adequate resources where the number of the patients will increase. The system may divert attention from other patient safety measures (Patton, 2002)

Conclusion

Rapid Response Teams have found their ways in many hospitals in the world. However, there is no evidence that show their effectiveness. Their only basis for implementation has been that they provide safety in hospitals and prevent death or other fatal outcomes from the patients whose medical condition is deteriorating.

Works Cited

Hillman, K., Bellomo, R., & DeVita, M. A. (2010). Textbook of Rapid Response Systems: Concept and Implementation. New York: Springer.

Jones, D. A., DeVita, M. A., & Bellomo, R. (2011). Rapid Response Teams. The New England Journal of Medicine.

Lin, D. M. (2008). Rapid Response Teams: Proven Strategies for Successful Implementation. Denvers: HCPro.

Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods 3rd Ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Vincent, C. (2008). Patient Safety. Sebastopol: Wiley Publishers.

Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at Melda Research in research paper writing services if you need a similar paper you can place your order for a custom research paper from research paper services

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