• Andreas H Taenzer, Joshua B Pyke, and Susan P McGrath.
• Department of Anesthesiology, Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA. taenzer@hitchcock.org
• Anesthesiology. 2011 Aug 1;115(2):421-31.

AbstractFailure-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.

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