Watcher Initiative Associated With Decrease in Failure to Rescue Events in Pediatric Population

Improved situation awareness may prevent unplanned ICU transfers. Transfers with serious safety issues may be classified as unrecognized situation awareness failure events (UNSAFE) and are associated with intubation, vasopressors, or >3 fluid boluses within 1 hour before or after ICU arrival. Our aim was to decrease the proportion of unplanned ICU transfers that met UNSAFE criteria by 50% in 1 year.

We adapted a previously described huddle-based intervention. In May 2015, we started a daily safety brief with hospital-wide representation; concurrently, nurses and residents separately identified watcher patients (ie, patients at risk for UNSAFE transfers) to be reported in the daily safety brief. Watcher patients frequently differed between the groups, so in July 2015, we started twice-daily watcher huddles on a pilot floor. During these huddles, nurses and residents jointly identified watcher patients on the basis of defined criteria and deployed mitigation plans. By March 2016, we implemented these huddles hospital-wide. We reviewed the electronic medical record to categorize all unplanned ICU transfers as safe or UNSAFE. Our outcome was the proportion of unplanned ICU transfers that met UNSAFE criteria.

In the 16-month pre-intervention period, 49 of the 322 unplanned ICU transfers were UNSAFE (median 15.5%); in the 12-month post-intervention period, 13 of the 329 unplanned ICU transfers were UNSAFE (median 3%). These findings represent an 81% reduction in the proportion of UNSAFE transfers.

Watcher huddles incorporated into the daily inpatient routine can significantly decrease UNSAFE transfers.