Association of Adverse Events With Rapid Response Team Activations in Hospitalized Children.
Adverse events were more frequent when rapid response teams triaged patients emergently.
Association of Adverse Events With Rapid Response Team Activations in Hospitalized Children.
Adverse events (adverse events) are frequent in hospitalized children and may lead to unplanned transfers to intensive care units (intensive care units).
We sought to measure and characterize adverse events around rapid response team activations and intensive care units transfers and whether different rapid response team triage mechanisms were associated with differences in adverse events rates or characteristics.
We performed a retrospective cohort study of hospitalized patients younger than 18 years with rapid response team evaluations for and transfers to intensive care units.
emergent triage carried a higher adverse event rate before intensive care units transfer
Most adverse events pretransfer resulted in temporary harm (National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention level F, 69.7%).
Most adverse events were preventable pre- (53.4%) and post-intensive care units transfer (51.6%).
The most common clinical types of adverse events were related to medications/fluids (38.3%), procedures (24.8%), and diagnosis (17.4%).
We identified high rates of adverse events among patients requiring intensive care units triage and transfer, especially among those triaged emergently.
Activation of an rapid response team or intensive care units transfer is a very high-yield trigger for adverse events detection.