Rapid Response to the Call for More METs.

Abstract

Rapid response teams (RRTs), also known as medical emergency teams (MET), are used as an effort to avoid “failure to rescue” situations in which patients unknowingly deteriorate in acute care facilities. Particularly in children, deterioration is usually not sudden, and we often have missed opportunities along the way to intervene before emergent resuscitation is needed. In fact, one of the 2008 National Patient Safety Goals was to “improve recognition and response to changes in a patient’s condition,” and several organizations created toolkits to aid institutions in formation of RRTs.1–3 The American Heart Association’s (AHA) Get With the Guidelines-Resuscitation (GWTG-R) registry is a database of >300 hospitals including information before, during, and after cardiac arrest.4 In 2000, this began with the AHA’s national registry for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and this transitioned to GWTG-R in 2010. The first publication from the GWTG-R MET module described by Raymond et al contains data from 3647 MET events in 151 hospitals from January 2006 to February 2012, certainly the largest cohort of such events published in …