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Project Title:
METS: Preventing Patient Crises: Protecting in Crisis
Funding Agency:
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
Total Project Period:
Apr 01, 2005 – Mar 31, 2006
Principal Investigator:
Michael A DeVita, MD
Project Summary:
Medical Emergency Teams (MET) are groups of health care professionals that may be assembled emergently in response to grave clinical deterioration, and that may enable hospitals to respond more effectively to inpatient crises. METs are distinct from traditional “code” or “cardiac arrest” teams because the intent is to respond to acute patient deterioration before a cardiopulmonary arrest occurs. This is important because a number of authors have now identified that important and outcome altering patient deteriorations occur frequently in hospitalized patients, and they are often under treated. There is evidence that delayed crisis treatment, even if very aggressively applied may not improve outcome. Patients in crisis have been defined by several authors as patients who meet any one of a set of very abnormal physiologic parameters of the respiratory, cardiovascular or neurologic systems. Using such criteria, Hillman conservatively estimates that some 130,000 crisis events per year occur in Australia alone (personal communication). In the United States, 10 times that amount could occur. If data from MET trials in the US and in Australia are an indication of the potential for outcome benefit, then about 30% of those deaths may be preventable! Nevertheless, this data is not widely known, and few institutions have implemented METs or MET-like critical care interventions to patients who become critically ill outside the ICU.
The primary purpose of this conference is to review impact on patient safety of designing and implementing hospital systems to identify and respond to patient deteriorations outside of the intensive care unit; to disseminate to healthcare professionals and institutions the concept of, benefits from and alternatives to implementation of organized medical response teams (METS) to patients in medical crisis; and to provide an opportunity for experts in the field (who are geographically widespread) to convene, evaluate the state of the science, and develop a consensus statement.
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