CODE BLUE

One of many differences that I have discovered in my nursing clinical is what to do in the event of a cardiac arrest. When a patient is not breathing and does not have a pulse, we call it a code blue in the US. There are several different color codes in the hospital that signify different things. Code red is a fire, code black is a bomb, etc. Here in New Zealand, they don’t use the color code system. If anything happens, you dial the hospital operator and tell them the problem and then they page whomever is needed. If a patient goes into cardiac arrest, you press the call button (each patient has a button that buzzes and a light turns on to tell the nurse that the patient needs assistance) three times and throw a pillow out the door. This can create a problem when a patient pushes the call button more than once when obviously she is not in cardiac arrest because it would be hard to push the button if you didn’t have a pulse because generally you are unconscious when this happens. Throwing a pillow into the hallway is also a rather antiquated method. In the US, there is a blue button in each room to push especially for a code blue situation that then pages the code team to the specific room. No confusion there. Blue button = code blue = code team come now.