Yeah the poster talking about “coding” is talking a bit of nonsense. “Coding” here is slang for “code blue” which is an American medical euphemism for cardiac arrest or medical emergency. Code blue is partially used to not cause alarm with patients (for example if tanoyed or if people overheard staff) and medical staff are familiar with it because its common in the US system. “Coding” is just a slang that medical staff say to each other and is a quasi medical term; its not an official term and would not be written in peoples notes for example.
And it is not an universal term. In the UK we call a cardiac arrest a cardiac arrest and put out an “arrest call”. It is unambiguous and doesnt fall into a trap of creating other “codes” that become confusing. Similarly we have Trauma Calls for trauma teams and so on.
Some US hospitals apparently use a range of codes like code purple, code white, code gray etc. To my knowledge its not even standardised in the US or often between nearby hospitals (although code blue wouldn’t have other meanings). I wouldn’t be surprised if some US hospitals also don’t use code blue at all anymore because it is unnecessarily ambiguous.
So we used a color system that’s mostly standardized. Code blue is respiratory or cardiac arrest, code red is fire, code gray is security, etc. we’re changing to plain language as that’s been shown to be best practice. Everything is still a code though. We’ve had code trauma, code stemi, code stroke. We also have rapid response for anything that doesn’t meet a code criteria but still needs assistance. My favorite was code brown for severe weather alert as that was our slang for cleaning a patient.
Nothing you’ve said is wrong, but (at least in the screenshot) the OP didn’t say anything about it being used in anything official. It’s a relatively common term in everyday language thanks to medical dramas which use coding a lot, and it’s even in the Merriam-Webster medical dictionary.
Not to invalidate what you’ve said! Just pointing out that it not being used in official contexts doesn’t make it nonsense to use elsewhere, like on some forum.
Yeah the poster talking about “coding” is talking a bit of nonsense. “Coding” here is slang for “code blue” which is an American medical euphemism for cardiac arrest or medical emergency. Code blue is partially used to not cause alarm with patients (for example if tanoyed or if people overheard staff) and medical staff are familiar with it because its common in the US system. “Coding” is just a slang that medical staff say to each other and is a quasi medical term; its not an official term and would not be written in peoples notes for example.
And it is not an universal term. In the UK we call a cardiac arrest a cardiac arrest and put out an “arrest call”. It is unambiguous and doesnt fall into a trap of creating other “codes” that become confusing. Similarly we have Trauma Calls for trauma teams and so on.
Some US hospitals apparently use a range of codes like code purple, code white, code gray etc. To my knowledge its not even standardised in the US or often between nearby hospitals (although code blue wouldn’t have other meanings). I wouldn’t be surprised if some US hospitals also don’t use code blue at all anymore because it is unnecessarily ambiguous.
So we used a color system that’s mostly standardized. Code blue is respiratory or cardiac arrest, code red is fire, code gray is security, etc. we’re changing to plain language as that’s been shown to be best practice. Everything is still a code though. We’ve had code trauma, code stemi, code stroke. We also have rapid response for anything that doesn’t meet a code criteria but still needs assistance. My favorite was code brown for severe weather alert as that was our slang for cleaning a patient.
Nothing you’ve said is wrong, but (at least in the screenshot) the OP didn’t say anything about it being used in anything official. It’s a relatively common term in everyday language thanks to medical dramas which use coding a lot, and it’s even in the Merriam-Webster medical dictionary.
Not to invalidate what you’ve said! Just pointing out that it not being used in official contexts doesn’t make it nonsense to use elsewhere, like on some forum.
I’m pretty sure the emergency services have another kind of arrest
It’d be unambiguous in the context of a hospital.
What if a patient was committing crimes?
Thank you for these insights!