The Use of Rapid Response Teams in Acute Care Hospitals

The Use of Rapid Response Teams in Acute Care Hospitals

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to expand the boundaries of reader's knowledge by presenting some relevant facts and figures related to the analysis of Rapid Response Teams in Acute Care Hospitals. The Rapid Response Team, also known as the emergency team, is a squad of clinicians who bring their expertise in critical care. Every day people die unnecessarily in hospitals. The purpose of Rapid Response Teams is to turn off the "spark" before it causes the "fire”.

Despite the issues of health insurance and increasing trend in the cost of healthcare, the people of America are still in the fantasy that the American Health System is one of the best healthcare systems in the world. Unfortunately, the evidence does not bear out this belief. The current statistics are an evidence of the poor performance of healthcare in US. More than 98,000 deaths that are witnessed in hospitals each year reflect the worsening performance of healthcare system in the country (Brilli, 2012). These deaths are considered to be the results of medial staff's incapability to address the critical issues in time, and thus become the core reason of over sighting the avoidable mortalities (Jones, 2007). In order to address this sever issue, there is a team proposed to cater the problem of high mortalities in hospitals, this team is commonly known as Rapid Response Team. The concept of Rapid Response Team was first proposed and implemented in Australia. With the passage of time, the concept of emergency teams had started gaining popularity in other parts of the world as well. The idea of having Rapid Response Teams in hospitals was adapted in United States in the late 1990s (Jones et al, 2009). Since then, the strategy of implementing RRTs in hospitals has extracted positive results and claimed to decrease the mortality by a significant percentage.

Hospital systems must be able to detect and treat the deterioration of patient's health before crisis occurs. Many patients die in hospitals for unexplained or unexpected reasons. The Rapid Response Teams tries to prevent the death of the patient by addressing the disease or illness with time and provide expertise in a fatal cardiac arrest. The rationale for this practice is that the abnormal physiological conditions can be treated effectively if it is addressed early.

The team has five well-defined functions on the patient (Winters, 2011):

Evaluation

Stabilization

Communication

Education

Preventive Actions

The Rapid Response Teams should conduct evaluation and stabilization of the patient by gathering accurate information. The team within its functions must be able to educate and support the staff serving the patient. The equipment must not overlap with the skills and knowledge of staff, the team should complement and transmit their experience to engage everyone in the process of providing timely service to the patient.

This systematic review and meta-analysis seeks to discover the effect of Rapid Response Teams in reducing mortality in acute care hospitals.

Significance of the study

Although, there are clutter of literature ...