Development of a Rapid Response Team to Reduce Codes outside of the ICU - Essay Example

The benefit of RRTs is that there is a drop in cardiac and respiratory arrests outside of the intensive care units (Simmonds, 2005). The scope and nature of the RRT are such that the professionals attached to the team have to be extremely competent, which means that these professionals are drawn away from other areas of requirement in a health care environment. There may be an argument that the nursing actions in RRTs assist patient nurses in formulating the situation, background, assessment, and recommendation (SBAR). However, this hardly diminishes that RRTs pose to nursing in terms of the lack of experience, work pressure due to the high patient-nurse ratio, which are factors in the high turnover among nursing professionals.

It must be remembered that the nursing professionals attached to RRTs are expected to carry with them critical thinking skills and that these nursing professionals come from non-intensive care environments, where skills and competencies are present to a much lesser degree than in the case of the nursing professionals in the intensive care environment. Thus it is important that appropriate education and training be given to nursing professionals before being made a part of RRTs, along with choosing the appropriate nursing professionals for such a role. In addition, it is essential that nurses in RRTs are not given competing responsibilities, as the overload will only lead to nursing staff turnover in RRTs (Simmonds, 2005).