Zygoteville

hospital emergency codes

I was at Kaiser the other day and took a cell phone photo of this flyer displaying various hospital emergency codes. Presumably, Kaiser and other hospitals use these emergency codes to disseminate important information to staff through their general paging system without alarming patients. I've been curious about hospital emergency codes ever since an episode of Grey's Anatomy used "Code Black" as "there is a bomb in the hospital" (or in this case, more specifically, "there is a live bomb in the internal cavity of a patient in the hospital"). My sister, who is a pediatrician, tells me that different hospitals use different coding systems. For example, at her hospital "Code Pink" is for a child abduction. And she confirmed that no, she had never heard of any hospital, including her own, which had a specific code for a bomb.