title: Incidents resulting from staff leaving normal duties to attend medical emergency team calls.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To determine the rate of adverse events and incidents occurring as a result of hospital staff leaving normal duties to attend medical emergency team (MET) calls.
  
  
  METHODS
  Single-centre, interview and questionnaire-based study of staff attending MET calls at a 650-bed university teaching hospital in Sydney, New South Wales, July to December 2013.
  
  
  METHODS
  The rate of adverse events and incidents directly related to MET staff leaving normal duties to attend MET calls.
  
  
  RESULTS
  During the study period, 1490 structured interviews were conducted, and 279 written questionnaires were returned (overall response rate, 66.4%). There were no adverse events. There were 378 recorded incidents. The incident rate was 213.7 incidents per 1000 MET participant attendances (95% CI, 194.8-233.5), and 1.1 incidents per MET call. Using the severity assessment code, 99.5% of incidents were classified as minimum. The most commonly reported incidents were disruptions to normal duties, ward rounds, and patient reviews. Only 0.8% of incidents were reported on institutional incident reporting systems.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Significant disruption to normal hospital routines and inconvenience to staff occurred, without causing major harm to patients, when MET staff temporarily left normal duties to attend MET calls. Normal hospital incident reporting systems cannot be used to monitor for these problems, as they are underreported.
authors.forename: Winston
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Cheung
authors.forename: Vineta
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Sahai
authors.forename: Jamie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mann-Farrar
authors.forename: Katina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Skylas
authors.forename: Joan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Uy
authors.forename: Breda
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Doyle
mesh_terms: D006323:Heart Arrest / Q000453:epidemiology; D057209:Hospital Rapid Response Team / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006784:Hospitals, Teaching; D006785:Hospitals, University; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D008505:Medical Staff, Hospital; D009517:New South Wales; D009741:Nursing Staff, Hospital; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013997:Time Factors; D016526:Workload