A team at Wishaw General has reduced the number of cardiac arrests that occur in their unit by a staggering 70 per cent.

The Emergency Care Unit was one of the pilot sites as part of the patient safety collaborative.

The team were set a challenge of reducing the number of cardiac arrests by 50 per cent, but ended up smashing their target.

Calum McGregor, consultant acute physician, said: “Due to the nature of the ECU, we can see a higher number of patients who are at risk of a cardiac arrest than in some other areas throughout the hospital.

“We identified a few areas to focus on to try and make our clinical observations more reliable, to recognise deteriorating patients early and to put in an appropriate response for those patients.

“Analysing our own data showed that hypoxia was our biggest challenge. So we focused our efforts on how we could alter our observations to quickly identify patients whose oxygen levels were dropping and change the way we respond.

“The team do observations on patients every day, they all came together to share their knowledge and come up with ideas on how we could improve our practice.

“We decided to standardise observation times so that there were no other tasks getting in the way when the observations were being done.

“We did work around visual aids to let staff know when the next observations were due, and documenting target sats appropriately.

“We put in a standard response to hypoxia. So that when the oxygen levels drop, we know exactly what we want to happen for each patient”

“Good teamwork was crucial, for example structured safety briefs and learning from what went well.”

The team have managed to maintain the reduced cardiac arrest rate since the project finished.