Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Rapid Response Systems and Medical Emergency Teams

Rapid Response Teams (RRTs) have been introduced into hospitals worldwide in an effort to improve the outcomes of deteriorating hospitalised patients. Recently, there has been increased awareness of the need to develop systems other than RRTs for deteriorating patients. In May 2016, the 12th International Conference on Rapid Response Systems and Medical Emergency Teams was held in Melbourne. This represented a collaboration between the newly constituted International Society for Rapid Response Systems (iSRRS) and the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society. The conference program included broad ranging presentations related to general clinical deterioration in the acute care setting, as well as deterioration in the emergency department, during pregnancy, in the paediatric setting, and deterioration in mental health status. This article briefly summarises the key features of the conference, links to presentations, and the 18 abstracts of the accepted free papers.

Transplantation ethics: old questions, new answers?

The first reported successful kidney transplantation occurred in 1954, between twins. Since then, organ donation and transplantation has become less a medical marvel than a common expectation of patients with a variety of diseases resulting in organ failure. Those expectations have caused demand for organs to skyrocket far beyond available supply, fueling an organ shortage and resulting in over 60,000 patients on transplant waiting lists. In this special issue, our contributors attempt to shed new light on some of the many old ethical questions raised by transplant in the contemporary context of extreme scarcity.

Reflections on non-heartbeating organ donation: how 3 years of experience affected the University of Pittsburgh's Ethics Committee's actions

In 1991, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) implemented a policy that permitted the recovery of organs from cadavers pronounced dead using standardized cardiac criteria (Non-Heartbeating Cadavers or NHBC). This policy allowed families that had made a decision to forgo life sustaining treatment to then request organ donation. This entailed taking the patient to the operating room, discontinuing therapy (typically but not necessarily a ventilator), and after the patient is pronounced dead, procuring organs.

Strategic marketing applications of conjoint analysis: an HMO perspective

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how data from a conjoint analysis study can be used to help determine the most appropriate marketing mix for an operational HMO which is entering a new market--the geriatric population. Included are two features which are absent in previous articles on health care applications of conjoint analysis: external validation of results, and a demonstration of how conjoint analysis can be used to simulate market responses to changes in the provider's marketing mix.

Measuring consumer preferences for ambulatory medical care arrangements

This paper describes how conjoint analysis can be applied to health care marketing. Data from a sample of 73 university students were used to estimate part-worth values for different levels of attributes of ambulatory care arrangements. A high degree of comparative validity was found.