title: A review of current and emerging approaches to address failure-to-rescue.
abstract: Failure-to-Rescue, defined as hospital deaths after adverse events, is an established measure of patient safety and hospital quality. Until recently, approaches used to address failure-to-rescue have been focused primarily on improvement of response to a recognized patient crisis, with limited success in terms of patient outcomes. Less attention has been paid to improving the detection of the crisis. A wealth of retrospective data exist to support the observation that adverse events in general ward patients are preceded by a significant period (on the order of hours) of physiologic deterioration. Thus, the lack of early recognition of physiologic decline plays a major role in the failure-to-rescue problem.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology, Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA. taenzer@hitchcock.org
authors.forename: Andreas H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Taenzer
authors.forename: Joshua B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Pyke
authors.forename: Susan P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: McGrath
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D003422:Critical Care; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital; D005260:Female; D017052:Hospital Mortality; D006801:Humans; D007362:Intensive Care Units; D008297:Male; D008991:Monitoring, Physiologic; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012306:Risk