What is the Rapid Response Team (RRT), how does the RRT operate, and is it effective? The RRT is a team of healthcare professionals consisting of a critical care registered nurse, respiratory therapist, and physician. The importance of their role in the hospital setting is to intervene at the onset of early signs of clinical deterioration. The RRT responds to non-intensive care units to prevent respiratory or cardiac arrest as unexpected clinical deterioration may occur anywhere in the hospital. The focus of this paper is to summarize the study on RRT, explain findings that are used in nursing practice, and to address ethical considerations associated with the conduct of the study.
The development of RRT in hospitals is to prevent clinical deterioration in non-intensive care units where unexpected illness, respiratory distress, cardiac arrest, stroke, myocardial infarction and arrhythmias can occur. The significance of having the RRT team available is to prevent further clinical deterioration when staff or family detects a decline in the patient's status. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) presented the RRT as part of their "100,000 Lives" Campaign to promote life saving methods in the healthcare setting (Stolldorf, 2008). The purpose of having the RRT is to restore balance, provide critical care expertise at the bedside when patient needs exceed available resources and to promote life saving methods in the healthcare setting. In essence, the deployment of the RRT is having an intensive care brought to the bedside of any patient in the hospital. The concept and phenomena of adopting the RRT in healthcare systems has improved patient safety and outcomes. The use of RRTs has improve the quality of care by reducing cardiac arrests and other acute life-threatening situations; it has also decreased length of stay and reduced patient mortality rates. .
The method of study used was qualitative, utilizing a grounded-theory design, which illustrated the role of the RRT as rapid response calls were activated.
