A prospective validation of National Early Warning Score in emergency intensive care unit patients at Beijing

Introduction: National Early Warning Score (NEWS) was launched in 2012 by the Royal College of Physicians in UK with an aim to improve the assessment of critical patients and timely detection of clinical deterioration. Objective: To assess the performance of NEWS in emergency intensive care unit (EICU) patients in Beijing, PROC. Design: prospective cohort study. Setting: EICU in a university hospital. Methods: The inclusion criteria were patients who stayed in the EICU beds under Department of Emergency Medicine, Xuanwu Hospital of Capital Medical University. Data of patients on admission were collected and calculated NEWS. Main outcome measure was death within 24 hours. The ability to predict mortality was assessed by area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) analysis. Results: Data on 540 consecutive EICU patients were collected from 1st January, 2013 to 31st March, 2013. Scores of 7 or more were associated with increased risk of death (OR=16.8; 95% CI 6.6-42.9). The AUROC for death within 24 h of admission was 0.85 (95% CI 0.79-0.90). Conclusions: NEWS is applicable and feasible for EICU patients in Beijing. This study shows that the prediction power of NEWS for death within 24 hours of acutely ill patients attending XuanWu Hospital is comparable to that reported for the United Kingdom patients.