Cost analysis of hospital emergency response teams

Decorative

CHE RESEARCH BITES

By Sachin Gupta, Ravindranath Tiruvoipati, Mayurathan Balachandran, Naomi Pratta, Jo Molloya, Eldho Paulc and Adam Irving

29 July, 2025

When patients in hospital wards become seriously unwell, emergency teams called Medical Emergency Teams (METs) are called to provide urgent care. These teams are traditionally led by junior doctors (registrars) from intensive care units, but some hospitals use specially trained nurse practitioners instead.

This Australian study compared the costs of these two approaches by analysing 1,343 emergency calls between 2016 and 2018. The researchers found that nurse practitioner-led teams were significantly cheaper, saving about AU$5,072 per emergency call compared to doctor-led teams.

The main reason for these savings was that patients treated by nurse practitioner teams spent less time in intensive care (2.8 days versus 4.1 days). This suggests that nurse practitioners may provide more timely and effective early interventions that prevent patients from deteriorating further.

The study calculated that a hospital would need at least 101 emergency calls requiring intensive care admission per year to make a 24-hour nurse practitioner service cost-effective. For the hospital studied, which had about seven emergency calls daily with 9.2% requiring intensive care, implementing this system would provide substantial cost savings whilst maintaining or improving patient outcomes.

This research supports expanding nurse practitioner-led emergency response teams as a cost-effective alternative to traditional doctor-led systems.

Gupta, S., Tiruvoipati, R., Balachandran, M., Bolton, G., Pratt, N., Molloy,  J., Paul, E., Irving, A. (2025). A propensity matched cost analysis of medical emergency team calls led by nurse practitioners versus intensive care registrars. Intensive Crit Care Nurs., 2025 Feb;86:103819. doi.org/10.1016/j.iccn.2024.103819

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CHE Research Bites are short, easy-to-understand summaries of our recent academic papers highlighting new evidence and insights on topical issues in the health and healthcare sectors.

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