Patients recently discharged from intensive care and patients admitted for emergency surgery are among those most at risk for a failure event. according to a study in Journal of the American College of Surgeons.
To find common characteristics among surgical patients who had experienced failure events, researchers examined case files for nearly 100 patients who had been transferred to intensive care over a 1-year period. Nine in 10 patients had been discharged from the intensive care unit to a standard surgical recovery ward during their hospitalization before experiencing failure.
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Respiratory complications were the most common cause of failure events (69 percent), which researchers suspect may be the result of premature discharge from the ICU. Overall mortality for the collective of failure events was 27 percent.
Nursing staff were most likely to identify failure, catching patient deterioration 54 percent of the time, while physicians on rounds reported 34 percent of failures. Other emergency notification such as rapid response and code blue was less common, occurring for 12 percent of failures and associated with higher mortality than physician or nurse failure identification.
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