Hospitals should replace emergency codes with plain language

Abstract

The common and frequent use of emergency codes by hospitals to communicate during life-threatening emergencies routinely segregates hospital staff from patients, visitors, and first-responders during emergencies by providing each group with a different level of information regarding the threat. By relying on codes instead of plain language to communicate during an emergency, a hospital may introduce ambiguity into a potentially life-threatening situation. Consequently, this means that coded alerts may endanger staff, patients, and visitors rather than protecting them from threats. This paper will maintain that (1) relying on codes, even standardized color codes for hospitals, interferes with the full integration of healthcare into the National Incident Management System (NIMS); (2) that planning to use plain language notifications improves coordination among response partners and ultimately increases safety for hospital patients, staff, and visitors; and (3) that the change to plain language is both practical and possible. This paper identifies both real world events and studies that demonstrate the benefits of using plain language alerts with directive messaging to elicit the desired response among members of the public during emergencies. This paper also presents guides that hospitals can use to transition from coded emergency messaging to plain language emergency alerts.

Correlations between emergency code awareness and disaster nursing competencies among clinical nurses: A cross‐sectional study

“…Recently, the use of emergency codes has been believed to hinder patients and visitors in timely evacuations, thus placing them in danger. Hence, plain language is more commonly used in combination with codes (Dauksewicz, 2019;Prickett & Williams-Prickett, 2018;Wallace & Finley, 2015).…”

Might Covid-19 Require Revision of Language Management?

“…The need to develop plain language communication protocols for healthcare services at the national level has already been set forth by scholars (Dauksewicz 2019). Researchers also launch monitoring platforms to understand the communicative patterns and language role in response to the humanitarian crisis in healthcare that pandemic caused (Betsch, 2020).…”

Breaking the Code: Considerations for Effectively Disseminating Mass Notifications in Healthcare Settings

“…There is no national standard in the United States (U.S.) for such warning systems in healthcare facilities [ 7 ]. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) emergency preparedness regulations include a requirement for the facility to be able to coordinate patient care “within the facility, across healthcare providers, and with state and local public health departments and emergency management agencies and systems” [ 8 ].…”

“…In fact, the publicly available resources for hospitals from TJC include guidance on multiple warning systems [ 11 ]. As a result of the lack of specific requirements, healthcare facility leaders often independently choose an emergency alert system that they believe will allow them to best maintain a safe environment of care [ 7 ].…”