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How do colors affect the world?  Do they make things easier or harder for identification purposes?  Colors are an important tool in everyday life.  For example, people know red means stop, and green means go.  Color coordination is used in different areas of life.  This is especially important in healthcare.  Healthcare providers use colors to quickly and efficiently treat patients in emergent situations.  Medications and uniforms are color coordinated for ease of identification. Different emergencies are color coded so that workers know what is going on.  Healthcare providers rely on colors to make their job more efficient and safer for the patients they are caring for.

One example of color coordination used in the healthcare setting is the color coding of scrub uniforms.  This is important for identification purposes.  In the workplace, you may not know the names of all your coworkers, especially if working at a large institution.  By having color coded uniforms, it is easy to identify the person that is needed in a particular situation.  At Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, nurses wear seal blue scrubs, emergency room nurses wear navy blue scrubs, respiratory therapists wear hunter green scrubs, doctors wear surgical green scrubs, female housekeepers wear purple scrubs while male housekeepers wear gray uniforms, students wear white scrubs, and transporters wear royal blue and black scrubs.  For example, if a patient was having trouble breathing, the nurse knows to look for someone in green scrubs and they can help the patient.  It is important for both patients and healthcare providers to know who is who in the hospital setting.  It saves time identifying the worker and therefore can save a life in the event of an emergency (Litak, 2011). Color coding scrubs is a easy and efficient way to help improve patient care in the healthcare setting.  

Emergency color codes are very important to healthcare workers in a hospital.  This tells workers emergencies that are going on in the hospital without causing panic for patients and visitors.  It also alerts the proper responders to the emergency.  Not all hospitals adapt the same color system for emergencies.  This can make things confusing to workers that work at more than one institution.  Emergency color codes are very thoroughly gone over during orientation for new employees, students, or volunteers.  If all workers are not on the same page, this can result in a dangerous situation.  A life threatening emergency for patients and staff can be the consequence of the poor communication (Keys & Selzler, 2011). For most institutions, code blue is an adult cardiac arrest and requires immediate response by designated personnel.  Code red is a fire in the area called overhead when the code is called.  Appropriate personnel respond to the fire.  Workers are provided with a quick reference card that goes on their badge with a list of all emergencies and their designated colors.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI8treCu98I Code Blue Video 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI8treCu98I

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