Mews at the time of ICU discharge is associated with outcome

Patients and Methods The study was done in the HagaZiekenhuis, a 600-bed teaching hospital in The Hague, Netherlands with all specialties available including cardiac surgery and neurosurgery. The hospital has a 16-bed adult ICU and an ICU based medical emergency team (MET). A MEWS is used throughout the hospital to monitor patients’ vital signs and a score of 3 points or more is the threshold to alert the patients’ doctor and the MET if necessary. As of 2013 the MEWS was to be recorded in the ICU discharge notes of all patients discharged from the ICU to the nursing wards of the hospital. For all consecutive patients admitted to the ICU in 2013 and discharged to the ward we collected baseline characteristics, outcome data and MEWS on discharge to study the association between outcome as measured by (1) post-ICU hospital mortality, (2) post ICU length-of-stay and (3) ICU readmission rate.