Code Blue Policy for a Tertiary Care Trauma Hospital in India

Abstract

“Code Blue” is generally used to indicate a patient requiring resuscitation or in need of immediate medical attention, most often as the result of a respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest. When called overhead, the page takes the form of “Code Blue, (floor), (room)” to alert the resuscitation team where to respond. Every hospital, as a part of its disaster plans, sets a policy to determine which units provide personnel for code coverage. In theory, any emergency medical professional may respond to a code, but in practice the team makeup is limited to those with advanced cardiac life support or other equivalent resuscitation training. Frequently, these teams are staffed by physicians (from anesthesia and internal medicine in larger medical centers or the emergency physician in smaller ones), respiratory therapists, pharmacists, and nurses. A code team leader will be a physician in attendance on any code team; this individual is responsible for directing the resuscitation effort and is said to “run the code”. This phrase was coined at Bethany Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas. The term “code” by itself is commonly used by medical professionals as a slang term for this type of emergency, as in “calling a code” or describing a patient in arrest as “coding”. 1 The purpose of this study is to make available policy with regard to Code Blue which can be followed in a tertiary care hospitals. It was a descriptive cross-sectional study carried out between January and June 2015. The study population included doctors, nursing personnel, paramedical staff and quality managers of tertiary care hospital from public and private hospitals. Checklist was made after an exhaustive review of literature which was then improvised. The checklist was discussed in focused group discussion held on 1 June 2015, and suggestions were incorporated. Validation of the checklist was also done by experts in various private and public hospitals. Subsequently, interaction was done with study population against the backdrop of the checklist and Code Blue policy was formulated.