From the Editor:

Thank you for the kind comments concerning this article. I, too, have seen the devastating results when heart disease goes undiagnosed in women. I am not familiar with any assessment tools specific to women and heart disease. If any of the readers know of an assessment tool, please let me know at [email protected].

To the Editor:

With interest I read the article on rapid response teams.1 The authors could not demonstrate a difference in overall mortality rates; however, they did find that the implementation of a rapid response team in their hospital played an important role in preventing cardiopulmonary arrests, as well as increased awareness among healthcare staff. Although the latter findings are important and add quite good value to the literature, they did not comment on the long-term outcome, neither on the cost issues related to less explored topics. As such, can the authors provide any additional data on the economic consequences of implementing a rapid response team such as cost of staff time, organization or educational programs, extra materials used, healthcare expenditures caused by intensive care unit readmissions, costs directly attributable to the required admission to long-term care facilities, revalidation programs, chronic treatments, but also potential cost savings as a result of avoiding unnecessary medical and/or diagnostic interventions, transfer to high-care units, shorter length of hospitalization, preventing attributable morbidity, and so on?2,3 In accordance to the use of automated external defibrillators, the current data presented by Jolley and colleagues1 together with this additional information could contribute to at least partially change the incorrect thinking that rapid response teams should not be cost-effective or in other words should not be worth the cost.4

Dominique M. Vandijck, MSc, MA, RN, CCRN

Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Ghent University

Department of Critical Care, Ghent University Hospital

Ghent, Belgium

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