Critical Care Capacity And The Rapid Response Team

Objective: Pediatric intensive care unit (ICU) capacity impacts timely and effective delivery of critical care to children who require it. Lack of a standard operating procedure (SOP) for identifying inpatients who need intensive care may contribute to delays in delivering critical care to these patients. During a 15 month period, delay in critical care delivery to general inpatients was identified as a contributing cause of harm in 9 of 18 inpatients who had a serious safety event. As a result of this common cause analysis finding, a performance …