A review of current and emerging approaches to address failure-to-rescue.

Failure-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.

Impact of pulse oximetry surveillance on rescue events and intensive care unit transfers: a before-and-after concurrence study.

Background: Some preventable deaths in hospitalized patients are due to unrecognized deterioration. There are no publications of studies that have instituted routine patient monitoring postoperatively and analyzed impact on patient outcomes.

Methods: The authors implemented a patient surveillance system based on pulse oximetry with nursing notification of violation of alarm limits via wireless pager.