Healthcare facilities in the state use roughly 80 different emergency codes to signify urgent events, including missing patients, bomb threats, falls, hazardous material spills, patients needing a rapid response and strokes, according to a PPSA analysis conducted using reports from July 2004 through December 2013.
Code systems vary in whether they use colors, letters, numbers, names or descriptive nouns to alert staff of patient events.
According to the PPSA, “This variation may lead to code confusion and cause a potential delay in care, a patient safety event or confusion for healthcare providers who work in more than one facility.”
For instance, among Pennsylvania healthcare facilities their are 15 different emergency codes used to describe a combative person, including “code gray,” “Dr. Armstrong,” “code manpower,” “code 12,” “code control,” and “code green.”
To avoid confusion and improve communication among healthcare workers, several hospital associations in other states — including Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin — have suggested using plain language systems that announce the alert category, specific code description and location of the event.
Plain language can typically be easily understood by staff, patients and visitors, according to the report.
Whether Pennsylvania facilities use plain language or an emergency code system, consistency is key, according to the PPSA, which wrote, “voluntary code standardization could reduce terminology variations, increase awareness and knowledge of healthcare professionals working in multiple facilities and promote transparency of code meanings.”
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