The Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists

Category: Patient Safety Series

Prediction of Patient Deterioration on the General Care Floor: Making the Connection with ICU Admissions & Resource Utilization – A Special Series on Perioperative Patient Safety
by Ashish K. Khanna, MD, FCCP, FCCM, Karuna Wongtangman, MD, and Matthias Eikermann, MD, PhD

A late-night code blue alarm ringing through a hospital’s hallways is not new to our ears. We as anesthesiologists and intensivists have been ‘first responders’ to these adverse events and also ‘first receivers’ of these patients in the ICU. This ‘4am’ patient deterioration phenomenon may be a simple lack of appropriate surveillance systems or maybe a more complex interplay of underlying patient physiology and concurrent disease insults.

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Prediction of Patient Deterioration on the General Care Floor and its Implications for Critical Care – A Special Series on Perioperative Patient Safety
by Ashish K. Khanna MD, FCCP, FCCM*

While anesthesia-related intraoperative mortality is rare, all-cause postoperative mortality, defined as death within the first 30 days of surgery, remains common. Overall, 30-day postoperative morality occurs in approximately 1-2% of all patients—approximately 1,000 times more frequently than anesthesia-related intraoperative mortality.

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