• Health, Standard 04/09/2015

The scope of the Hospital rapid response calls cluster is all rapid response calls for patients admitted to hospital.

Hospital rapid response calls are part of a formal rapid response system designed to alert and call a team of designated staff for help when a patient's vital signs have fallen outside set criteria.

A hospital's rapid response team(s) may be specialised in its training for the situations to respond to (for instance, a cardiac arrest team) or its composition (for instance, teams made up of intensive care liaison nurses) or it may include both medical and nursing staff trained to respond rapidly to a wide range of situations involving patient clinical deterioration (for instance, medical emergency teams).

Rapid response call

The cluster is designed so that data on each rapid response call are recorded. Data are collected for each rapid response call placed with a rapid response team to attend to an admitted hospital patient. When there are multiple rapid response calls made during a single episode of admitted patient care, each call should be separately recorded.

A hospital may have more than 1 type of team trained to provide rapid responses. Therefore a single episode of admitted patient care may have multiple rapid response calls involving different types of rapid response teams.

The data collected on the rapid response calls should be linked to the episode of admitted patient care which contains other relevant information, for instance, patient demographics.