Emergency Medical Response for Non-Hospitalized Person Events in a Children’s Hospital

Abstract

OBJECTIVES Hospital-based code blue (CB) teams are designed for hospitalized patients (HP) with unanticipated medical emergencies outside of an ICU. At our freestanding pediatric institution, the same team responds to CB calls involving nonhospitalized persons (NHP) throughout the hospital campus. We hypothesized there are significant differences between the characteristics of NHP and HP requiring emergency medical response, and most responses for NHP do not require advanced critical care. METHODS We analyzed a retrospective cohort of CB responses at our large, urban, academic children’s medical center from January to December 2017. We evaluated the demographic and clinical characteristics of these HP compared with NHP events. RESULTS There were 168 CB activations during the study, of which 135 (80.4%) were for NHP. Ninety-one (67.4%) of the NHP responses involved adults (age >18 years) compared with 6 (18.2%) of the HP. Triggers for CB team activation for NHP were most frequently syncope (42.2%), seizure (10.3%), or fall (9.6%) compared with seizure (30.3%), hypoxia (27.3%), or anaphylaxis (12.1%) for HP. Critical interventions such as bag-mask ventilation and cardiopulmonary resuscitation were infrequently performed for either cohort. CONCLUSIONS CB activations in our pediatric institution more often involve NHP than HP. NHP responses are more likely to involve adults and infrequently require advanced interventions. Use of a pediatric CB team for NHP events may be an unnecessary use of pediatric critical care resources. Future studies are warranted to evaluate the most effective team composition, training, and response system for NHP in a freestanding children’s hospital.