[Benefits of medical emergency teams : Mortality on normal wards and readmission to intensive care wards].

Medical emergency teams (MET) were implemented in many hospitals worldwide in order to identify patients at risk on normal wards and to initiate diagnostics and therapy without delay. Ideally, the implementation leads to prevention of cardiac arrests and unexpected deaths on normal wards, reduced rates of admissions to intensive care units and hospital mortality. Various track and trigger systems are available to identify such patients and for them to be assessed and treated within 30-45 min by the MET. The ideal personnel composition of METs has not yet been established. Whether the implementation of an MET generally leads to an improvement of treatment on normal wards or to a reduction in mortality in hospitals has not been finally clarified. Mortality and morbitidy (M&M) conferences can help to analyze if an individual clinic is likely to profit from the introduction of a MET.