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The Code Green system was designed for urgent notification of specific individuals (usually a physician) or team (eg. anesthesia/respiratory). Code Green Anesthesia-Respiratory teams were designed to respond to urgent, but not life-threatening, respiratory and airway management situations. The Code Blue team provides emergency cardiopulmonary resuscitation in response to cardiac and / or respiratory arrests. The current Code Blue procedures for communicating cardiac and/or respiratory arrests, including overhead announcements, will not change.
While the current Code Blue procedures for communicating cardiac and/or respiratory arrests, including overhead announcements, will not change, effective October 4, all code greens previously called with overhead announcements will become stat pages and the Code Green Anesthesia- Respiratory team will become the “Stat Anesthesia-Respiratory Team”.
Notification and requests for urgent physician responses will still be conducted by contacting the paging operator through the cardiac arrest and emergency phone number (ext. 2-6555). For urgent physician / team notification, the paging operator requires the type of notification (eg. Stat Anesthesia /Respiratory Team or stat “specific physician”) and the patient’s room location. This team will respond in the same timely manner as in the past. If patients need to be seen immediately, a Code Blue is more appropriate to facilitate an immediate response team.
For situations formerly considered “Code Green – specific physician / service,” stat contacts will now consist of alphanumeric pages stating the urgent message and patient location. The only exception to these Code Green changes are for obstetric patients: Code Green Obstetrics-Anesthesia and Code Green Obstetrics-Pediatrics will not change at this time.
In addition, new code event and resuscitation review forms requiring team members’ input and signatures will soon replace current forms. These forms permit BWH to participate in the National Registry for CPR database and will enhance our quality improvement and benchmarking capabilities.
For more documentation on these changes, please refer to the Patient Care Policies (#31) in BICS. Contact Jeffrey Rothschild, MD (Code Team Medical Director), Peter Stone, MD and Judith Perron, RN (Co-Chairpersons, CPR Committee) or Angela Cleary, RN (Code Team Coordinator) with any questions.