Report on Formulating a Research Question and Finding the Best Research Evidence: Rapid Response Team and Hospital Mortality

Report on Formulating a Research Question and Finding the Best Research Evidence: Rapid response team and hospital mortality
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Introduction
Rapid response teams (RRTs) have been identified as potentially beneficial to improving patient outcome, as nurses aim to improve the safety of patients. Patient outcomes include prolonged hospitalization, cardiac arrests, and mortality (O’Horo et al., 2015). There is a need to understand the effectiveness of rapid repose team in acute care settings. Research on the intervention fails to address how detecting patients who are risks of deteriorating are affected by the rapid response intervention. During hospitalization, some patients may require the intervention of rapid repose teams compared to others especially those who are chronically ill, those vulnerable to mental illnesses and cardiac diseases. Delays in treatment compromises health outcomes for hospitalized patients, and for those requiring end of life care regular team visits are necessary (Jäderling et al., 2013). Hospitals have allocated resources to support RRT, but some have not relied on published data to determine the effectiveness of this intervention.
The research seeks to understand the association between rapid response and patient mortality, and the search strategy will use those keywords to narrow down the research. Studies reviewed will include research where the participants of the study are patients who are 18 years or older, who have spent more than 1 week in the hospital and were admitted during the time of the study. The intervention is having a rapid repose team catering to the patient needs and this is compared with not having a rapid response team. The outcomes will compare mortality rates at the pre-intervention and post-intervention stage. The review is chosen as it is exhaustive, supports evidence based resources and results can be extrapolated.
In a study by Salvatierra et al (2014), the researchers found that there was the long-term decline in mortality rates in an acute care hospital setting even after the rapid response time indicating that there could be other reason for improving health outcomes. The PICO question is, “In hospitalized patients do rapid response teams, compared to having no rapid response teams reduce patient mortality and improve patient outcome during their stay in hospital?”
Methods
The search strategy focused on the key terms, rapid response team and patient mortality, and using both terms together was necessary since the electronic database are sensitive to searches. The database includes Ebscohost/ CINAHL Databases, Proquest, PubMed. The case of using stop words is that the database generates related research studies, but one can then use the subjects, and is a Boolean operator that narrows the search, helping to retrieve the articles where the search terms are used together. The limiters then limit the searches to the specified criteria including full text, peer reviewed and the time span, and the information is limited to what is selected.
The related subject terms and subheadings include hospital patients, intensive care and medical emergency team. Even though, the key terms are useful; in the search strategy they may not be enough to have a comprehensive search, highlighting the case for using similar phrases, related terms or synonyms. Besides reduction in mortality, similar search term was improving patient safety and outcome. The search method has been chosen to identify relevant articles related to rapid response team in hospitals. This is necessary to determine how the intervention affects health outcomes and staff satisfaction since nurses perception influence the effectiveness of RRT.
Results of Search
In the Proquest database searching Rapid response team and hospital mortality yields 12,886 Results, and by narrowing down to scholarly journals there are 6,902 Results. Additionally, by modifying the search to include the full text and peer reviewed journal articles there were 5,533 results. Since there is a need to use evidence-based articles that are relevant, the search is narrowed down to the last six years from 2010 to 2016. On the other hand, in Ebscohost there are 122 results when using the search terms “Rapid response team and hospital mortality” However, some of the research articles only contained the abstract, using the limiters “Full Text” and “ Scholarly/ Peer Reviewed”, th...