Another review of rapid response teams

---concludes:

In summary, RRSs take the skills and expertise of the critical care team beyond the walls of the ICU within minutes to the bedside of deteriorating patients, whose condition may well progress to cardiac or respiratory arrest. RRSs would stabilize patients, prevent development of critical illness or cardiopulmonary arrest and contribute to the optimization of the care of other patients through education of healthcare givers working in the general medical and surgical wards. Their implementation requires significant resources and involves a change in the culture of healthcare provision. Although their merits look obvious and thus their deployment in hospitals seems to be intuitive, the available evidence for their effectiveness in improving the outcomes of such patients is weak and of suboptimal quality. Whether they should become the standard of acute hospital care needs to be answered.