[Effect of emergency intervention team still unclear. More evidence is necessary]

Changes in health care culture are accompanied by a flood of initiatives with respect to patient safety and quality of care. These initiatives are incentives from government, laymen press, health insurance companies and health care providers. This makes evidence-based patient safety an absolute necessity to guide the priorities of policy makers. A medical emergency team (MET), also referred to as a rapid response team (RRT), is an example of a good initiative to improve health care quality that is being embraced rapidly worldwide, but solid evidence of its effectiveness is lacking. The number of cardiopulmonary arrests seems to have decreased, but adequate correction for case mix confounders has not been done and the effect on patient outcome, i.e. in-hospital mortality, has not been convincingly demonstrated.