Medical Emergency Teams based on anesthesiologists

ABSTRACT

The essential help of medical emergency teams (M.E.T.) is to decrease the frequency of sudden deaths and the pointless transport of patients in the intensive care units. Aim of present study is to record the number and the type of urgent intrahospital callings, the departments of hospital that were covered by M.E.T, the staff (medical and/or nursing) that participated in them, the medications that were used, and the number of involved individuals per incident, as well as the type of monitoring and the fluids that were used. In the particular study were recorded the urgent calls from the 07/06/2006 up to the 07/01/2007 (7 months). The teams, that were created, covered daily 12 departments. The main providers in M.E.T were anaesthetists. They were recorded 191 calls in total. Monitoring included, SpO2, arterial pressure, number of breathings and estimation of neurologic condition with the Glasgow scale or AVPU scale, as well as the examination of the pupils. Only one individual was needed in 99 (52%) incidents. The medium time of his employment with the patient was 57{10-300}min. In 89(45%) cases was called 2nd individual (trainee), while in 22(12%) calls a 3rd trainee was called. Nurse of anesthetic department involved only in 17(9%) incidents, while special anesthetist attended in 28(15%) cases. The average amount of fluids were given per patient were 860{0-7500} ml. The rapid sequence induction was used in the majority of cases (63%) with etomidate or thiopentone and the succinylocholine. CONCLUSION: The existence of criteria as well as the response to emergency calls from organized teams, helped in the more objective recognition of befalling crisis as well as in the better and more systematic recording of such incidents, even after completion this study.