Better Every Day – Celebrating Success

In our Quality Strategy we have made a commitment to delivering improvements in a number of key strategic areas.

This included delivering the goal of the National Scottish Patient Safety Programme to reduce cardiac arrests in an acute ward setting by 50% by March 2017.

Our deteriorating-patient improvement focus is aimed at the group of patients highlighted in red in the diagram below with the aim of:

  • Identifying patients who require interventions and escalation of care before they suffer a cardiac arrest.
  • Identifying patients whose deterioration represents a progression towards the end of life and who require an appropriate plan of care and advance decision-making to prevent inappropriate resuscitation attempts where these would not be successful.

To date we have achieved a 58% reduction in the cardiac arrest rate due to our staff implementing reliable processes to recognise and respond to sick patients. Look out for further updates in future editions of the staff brief.