Brooke Ginglen, Corrie Taylor, Ashley Ferris, and Yvonne Pinkerton are responsible for the Behavioral Resource Team. BRT came out of receiving multiple requests a week to help support the medical teams with challenging patient behaviors and the need for support during a violent restraint. Without a structure to provide this type of support, it was challenging for the psych nurses to leave the unit and spend the amount of time required to help the nurses work through these events. 

They turned to the literature and the American Psychiatric Nurses Association to understand what other hospitals are doing to support their teams with these challenges, and they found Behavioral Response Teams becoming a common resource being implemented by organizations. Like rapid response and stroke teams, BRT teams are experts in their specialty who are available to support teams with challenging behaviors related to a clinical presentation. 

They completed a literature review, developed a multidisciplinary team to better understand what type of support our teams really needed, collected baseline data, recruited peers to participate, and implemented a pilot. The pilot did exactly what we hoped, which was to minimize calls to security and utilization of violent restraints. The pilot was so successful that they just rolled out another pilot expanding their services to all inpatient units. They took everything they learned from the first pilot and feedback from the medical team to better serve the organization.