Safer care for acutely ill patients

Recently a family friend of many years was acutely ill in hospital, fortunately, she recovered and returned home. It was perhaps this incident that alerted me to the new guidelines released on 25 July 2007 by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE, 2007) – Acutely Ill Patients in Hospital: Recognition of, and Response to, Acute Illness in Hospitalised Adults. The development of the guidelines were prompted by The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA, 2007) publication, Safer Care for the Acutely Ill Patient: Learning From Serious Incidents, which is a comprehensive analysis of incident reports on 107 patients, whose deaths in acute hospitals were reported to the agency because of concerns about the safety of their care.