Hospital Emergency Incident Command System

Hospital emergency codes are coded messages often announced over a public address system of a hospital to alert staff to various classes of on-site emergencies. The use of codes is intended to convey essential information quickly and with minimal misunderstanding to staff while preventing stress and panic among visitors to the hospital. Such codes are sometimes posted on placards throughout the hospital or are printed on employee identification badges for ready reference.

Hospital emergency codes have often varied widely by location, even between hospitals in the same community. Confusion over these codes has led to the proposal for and sometimes adoption of standardized codes. In many American, Canadian, and Australian hospitals, for example "code blue" indicates a patient has entered cardiac arrest, while "code red" indicates that a fire has broken out somewhere in the hospital facility.

In order for a code call to be useful in activating the response of specific hospital personnel to a given situation, it is usually accompanied by a specific location description (e.g., "Code red, Second floor, corridor three, room two-twelve"). Other codes, however, only signal hospital staff generally to prepare for the fallout of some external event such as a natural disaster.

Note:Different codes are used in different hospitals.

"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 (by cardiac arrest is nowadays considered to not just mean asystole, the most severe example, but also pulseless electrical activity [PEA], coarse or fine ventricular fibrillation [VF or V-fib], or unstable irregular ventricular tachycardia [VT or V-tach]- some of these lethal, non-circulating arrhythmias are shockable by a defibrillator, some are not and are primarily treated by epinephrine and similar drugs). 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 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" or "coded".

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