Patient- and relative-activated critical care outreach: a 7-year service review

Summary

Call for Concern is an initiative from the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust enabling patients and their families to directly refer patients to the critical care outreach team.

Content

Mandy Odell, Nurse Consultant, Critical Care, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, Reading, has implemented this initiative in her hospital and beyond.

Five years following the introduction of a whole-hospital, 24-hour critical care outreach (CCO) service, an additional service was introduced that enabled patients and their families to directly call the CCO team if they had concerns that were not being acknowledged by the patient’s clinical team. The aim of this review, published in the Journal of Nursing, was to report on 7 years of patient and family referrals using quantitative and free text data extracted from the CCO referral database.