Question

What are the major ramifications when the health care team “fails to rescue” the patient and Identify what hospital policies should be in place and identify previous case laws.

Answer 1

FTR (Failure to rescue) means a death resulted by any major/minor complication in the medical treatment.

Although majorly the ramifications are preventable but sometimes the probability changes. The failure to rescue is almost inversely proportional to the hospital's or the concerned centre's ability to rescue the patient successfully after the complications.

Failure to rescue data can be collected from various departments of the hospitals, but the resultant fact is that among FTR patients, there were 3 types to be differentiated i.e. Some could be non preventable, some could be potentially preventable and some were fully preventable.

The reasons of failure are related to changing factors like updates systems in the centres, nurses to bed ratios, or education levels of the staff.

Besides all aspects, the overall characteristics of hospital is what that matters including its working culture, safety measures, etc.

According to a study done in the year 1995, almost 15000 people died in Australia and nearly 50000 were permanently disabled due to failure to rescue and other ill effects of health care systems. Noticeably, among them 50 percent cases were preventable.

So, in order to ensure patient's safety in hospitals, a system such as RRS(Rapid Response System) should be made that evaluate the acute care of patients to prevent deaths.