Medical Emrgency Teams. Implementation and Outcome Measurement

About this book

Medical Emergency Teams: A Manual for Preventing Preventable Hospital Deaths addresses the problem of patient safety and quality of care; the logistics of creating a MET (resource allocation, process design, workflow, and training); the implementation of a MET (organizational issues, challenges); and the evaluation of program results. Based on successful MET models that have resulted in reduced in-hospital cardiac arrest and overall hospital death rates, this book is the first practical guide for physicians, hospital administrators, and other healthcare professionals who wish to initiate a MET program within their own institutions.

Written for:

Critical care physicians (intensive care), emergency physicians, hospital administrators, critical care nurses, anesthesiologists, medical ethicists

Table of contents

Hospital patient safety.- Patient safety: top-down or bottom-up?.- Why the current system fails.- Quality of critical care before ICU admission.- Changing nature of modern hospitals.- Acute medicine as a specialty.- Potential impact of trainees on outcome.- Matching level of illness with level of care.- The MET system: what is a MET?.- MET-type systems.- Critical care outreach teams.- Designing patient safety into graduate medical education.- Hospital size & location and MET feasibility.- METs as a QI tool: finding and correcting errors that matter.- Nursing perspectives.- General principles of implementing METs.- Organizational issues.- Equipment.- Personnel.- Overcoming political hurdles.- Obtaining financial support.- METs in teaching hospitals.- Teaching organized crisis teams using human simulators.- Pediatric METs.- Principles of evaluating systems.- Outcome and process measurements/metrics.- Return on investment: are METs worth the cost?