Читать книгу Essential Guide to Acute Care - Nicola Cooper - Страница 17

Medical emergency teams (METs) were developed in Australia and consist of doctors and nurses trained in advanced resuscitation skills. The idea is that seriously abnormal vital signs trigger an emergency call rather than waiting for cardio‐pulmonary arrest to trigger an emergency response. Box 1.1 shows the original MET calling criteria. In the UK, early warning scores have been developed to trigger urgent responses (see Table 1.1), usually to the patient’s own team or the ICU outreach team. The purpose of a medical emergency team instead of a cardiac arrest team is simple – early action saves lives. As one of the pioneers of resuscitation commented, ‘The most sophisticated Intensive Care often becomes unnecessarily expensive terminal care when the pre‐ICU system fails’.¹³