Australia. Two Decades of Evolving a Patient Safety System: An Australian Story of Reducing Harm to Deteriorating Patients
Jeffrey Braithwaite, Ken Hillman, Charles Pain, and Clifford F. Hughes
CONTENTS
Background..........................................................................................................373
A Historical Perspective on Managing Patients' Deterioration...................374
Impact and Spread..............................................................................................375
Implementation: Transferability of the Exemplar..........................................376
The Recipe for Success, and Prospects for Building Further Success..........376
Next Steps: New Applications of the MET Experience.................................377
Background
This is a story about an innovative Australian patient safety system, designed by clinicians and refined through 2 decades of endeavor and experimentation. Its latest evolution into a state-wide system was stimulated by top-down endorsement after a major enquiry and was delivered through middle-out expertise sponsored by the Clinical Excellence Commission in New South Wales: the Between the Flags (BtF) system (Coiera, 2009). The precursor to BtF was the medical emergency team (MET) concept, one of the most successful improvement initiatives in the last 20 years.
