Aim: 50% reduction in the cardiac arrest rate in general wards by June 2016 The harm from cardiac arrests is considerable. Published evidence over the last 20 years has shown that cardiac arrests occur in hospital patients often after a 6 hour period of physiological deterioration. In many cases this deterioration can be detected using clinical observations i.e. blood pressure, pulse, temperature, heart rate at the correct frequency. The process improvement I have been supporting to date is achieving reliability of clinical observations (BP, Temp, Pulse, Resp & Frequency) above 95%.
