• Nurs Manag (Harrow) · Apr 2015

    Early warning scores: a sign of deterioration in patients and systems.

    • Adrian Fox and Naomi Elliott.
    • St James's Hospital, Dublin, Ireland.
    • Nurs Manag (Harrow). 2015 Apr 1;22(1):26-31.

    AbstractThe early warning score system is a decision-making tool that has a simple design, yet its implementation in healthcare organisations is proving complex. This article reports the results of a survey that evaluated nurses' experiences of using the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) in an acute hospital in Ireland. Staff reported that the NEWS was easy to use, did not increase workload and enhanced their ability to identify deteriorating patients. However, they also identified problems related to doctors' delayed response times, doctors' lack of training in the use of the tool, and a failure by doctors to modify trigger parameters for patients with chronic conditions. NEWS enhances nurses' roles in early detection of patient deterioration, but delays in response times by doctors expose systematic flaws in health care. This suggests that it is not only an indicator of patient deterioration, but also of deteriorating healthcare systems.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…