AHRQ Patient Safety Network - Patient Safety Primers

Rapid Response Systems

Background

Rapid response teams represent an intuitively simple concept: When a patient demonstrates signs of imminent clinical deterioration, a team of providers is summoned to the bedside to immediately assess and treat the patient with the goal of preventing intensive care unit transfer, cardiac arrest, or death. Such teams have become a widely used patient safety intervention due in large part to their inclusion in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's "100,000 Lives Campaign" in 2005. However, the rapid response team concept has come to exemplify the tension between those arguing for swift implementation of conceptually attractive patient safety interventions supported by anecdotal evidence of benefit and those advocating a more rigorous, evidence-based—and inevitably slower—approach.

Patients whose condition deteriorates acutely while hospitalized often exhibit warning signs (such as abnormal vital signs) in the hours before experiencing adverse clinical outcomes. In contrast to standard cardiac arrest or "code blue" teams, which are summoned only after cardiopulmonary arrest occurs, rapid response teams are designed to intervene during this critical period, usually on patients on general medical or surgical wards.

Several different models of rapid response teams exist (see Table 1), and a 2006 consensus conference advocated use of the term "rapid response system" (RRS) as a unifying term. Hospitalists are increasingly assuming RRS duties, either as the primary responder or to assist nurse-led teams.

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AHRQ Patient Safety Network - Patient Safety Primers