When patients fulfill one or more criteria, ward staff activate the RRT, which then reviews and treats the patient.
This context sensitivity of the RRS has not previously been described but appears to be a strong sociocultural influence on whether junior staff activate the RRS.
With many senior staff living 20 30 min away, this could have been disastrous had staff not activated themselves in response to media information.
Finally, information on episodes of MET review was obtained from the hospital switchboard log and did not provide information on the member of staff who activated the system.
Any member of hospital clinical staff (including nurses, physiotherapists, social workers, speech therapists, residents and members of senior medical staff) could activate the MET.
16 While previous studies 17 21 have documented the incidence of failure of bedside clinical staff to activate an emergency response team, to our knowledge no study has investigated the reasons why staff do not activate the RRS.
For example, when Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, brings investors to see WeWork offices, he reportedly calls ahead to tell staff to "activate the space".
The role of simple supportive devices, like nursing beds, can help care staff to activate bed-ridden people.
Instead, the results suggest that there should be more effort in understanding individual and bedside cultural issues that may be preventing staff from activating the RRS.
Any member of the hospital clinical staff could activate the MET team (including social workers), and the average response time was a phenomenal 1.7 min. This figure we find particularly astounding, and reflects Australia's resurgence as a sporting nation.
