System Thinking: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants or What Can We Learn from the Patient Safety Movement?

While the review of events of failure to rescue is often focused on individuals, understanding of systems that facilitate safety is crucial to facilitate sustainable improvement. Patient safety has been growing as a movement over the last decades, and insights from other industries and areas of healthcare are helpful to understand what might or might not work for rapid response systems. The aim of this chapter is to add context to the development of rapid response systems through a patient safety lens by discussing a set of landmark studies on quality and safety. The authors will use ten “simple rules” from “Crossing the Quality Chasm” as the framework to describe the function of rapid response systems in a modern healthcare system.