No prohibition on emergency codes on ID badges, but . . .
I was intrigued by a question posed on one of HCPro's talk groups about whether it was permissible for staff members to have emergency codes, such as RACE, on the back of their ID badges.
There is certainly no standards-based prohibition on them from The Joint Commission. However, there are surveyors that do not find this an appropriate practice, especially when it comes to your fire response plan. To be honest, I tend to agree that staff need to be able to respond to a fire without consulting their ID, but I digress.
Ultimately, the proof is in the practice. Using the fire response plan as the example, does someone monitor how often staff are consulting their badges during drills? EC.5.30 requires each organization to annually evaluate the effectiveness of fire response training. If staff are relying "too much" (again, for you to decide what that means) on the badge to walk through the process, it may well be representative of an improvement opportunity relative to education.
At previous and current hospitals I have whittled the number of "codes" to two, the rest of the notifications are
in plain English. Fire and Cardiac/respiratory arrest are the only remaining "codes". Following the NIMS model
plain language announcements will not only assist the hospital's full-time staff, but also those who are temporary
or part-time as well. My recommendation is to forget the codes and just say what is needed to be said.
Thanks...Scott Wallask, senior managing editor