The concept of failure to rescue captures the idea that health care systems should be able to rapidly identify and treat complications when they occur.
Failure to rescue is a term used in healthcare to describe situations where a patient experiences a complication or deterioration, but healthcare providers fail to rescue or appropriately respond to prevent further harm or death.
It highlights the importance of timely and effective interventions in healthcare settings.
The concept of resilience refers to the ability of a treatment team to identify changes in a patient’s condition quickly and to act on those changes in a manner that benefits the patient’s health.
Failure to rescue would occur in any situation where the clinical team was unable to mitigate preventable harm to patients.
As a safety and quality measure, failure to rescue has been defined as the inability to prevent death after the development of a complication.
The development of failure-to-rescue measures isconsidered an important advance in quality and safety measurement.
Hospital volume, communication failures, and lower nurse staffing have all been associated with higher failure-to-rescue rates, as have staffing models involving fewer physician resources.