Incidents resulting from staff leaving normal duties to attend medical emergency team calls

To determine the rate of adverse events and incidents occurring as a result of hospital staff leaving normal duties to attend medical emergency team (MET) calls.

Single-centre, interview and questionnaire-based study of staff attending MET calls at a 650-bed university teaching hospital in Sydney, New South Wales, July to December 2013.

The rate of adverse events and incidents directly related to MET staff leaving normal duties to attend MET calls.

During the study period, 1490 structured interviews were conducted, and 279 written questionnaires were returned (overall response rate, 66.4%). There were no adverse events. There were 378 recorded incidents. The incident rate was 213.7 incidents per 1000 MET participant attendances (95% CI, 194.8-233.5), and 1.1 incidents per MET call. Using the severity assessment code, 99.5% of incidents were classified as minimum. The most commonly reported incidents were disruptions to normal duties, ward rounds, and patient reviews. Only 0.8% of incidents were reported on institutional incident reporting systems.

Significant disruption to normal hospital routines and inconvenience to staff occurred, without causing major harm to patients, when MET staff temporarily left normal duties to attend MET calls. Normal hospital incident reporting systems cannot be used to monitor for these problems, as they are underreported.