Medical Emergency Teams (METs) are a preplanned group of health care practitioners who respond to acute patient deteriorations in hospitalized patients. They are usually identical to hospital “code” teams, with the exception that they respond prior to patients’ developing cardiac arrest. This recovery response has been shown to decreased unexpected hospital mortality by some 30% in hospitals in the United States, Australia, and Great Britain.

This course will review the impact on patient safety of METs. Special emphasis will be placed on logistics: how to design the system based on hospital size and provider mix, how to measure the impact of the intervention, how to train staff and change culture, and how to “sell it”. The course will also disseminate to healthcare professionals and institutions the concept of planning systems to find patients in crisis and prevent demise.

We gratefully acknowledge financial support for the conference from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). This DVD was supported by an AHRQ contract to the RTI IDSRN and subcontract to University of Pittsburgh, Contract # 290-00-0018, Task 15.