Though an ED’s level of activity would seem a highly relevant factor for EMS workers deciding where to take a patient, it is not, said Manish Shah M.D., Center Regional EMS Advisory Council chairman and an emergency medicine specialist with URMC. Red means that an ED is completely backed up, yellow means it is clogged but still moving, and green means an ED is clear to accept patients. The color-code system rates EDs’ activity levels as red, yellow or green. The decision to abandon color codes came at the urging of area ED directors, who looked at data compiled by the Greater Rochester Quality Council and conferred with EMS workers before deciding to at least temporarily scrap the long-used system. Now, unless there is clear medical reason to take them to a specific facility, the workers take patients to the hospital of their choice. Ambulance workers used to take patients to the nearest hospital, he said. If somebody says they want to go to Highland, they’ll take them to Highland."įor EMS workers, patient safety trumps almost all considerations other than medical necessity, he added. "Patient autonomy is a prime consideration," Czapranski said. Heart patients could go only to a hospital with cardiac catheterization capabilities.
Trauma center levels rochester ny code#
Similarly, severely injured patients would be taken to Strong, which has the area’s only trauma center, even if the ED had called a code red. Ambulance workers could and would bring patients to a code-red ED if a patient asked to be taken there. They were meant to be taken as advisories, Czapranski said. Even then, the Unity ED took in and treated some walk-ins, keeping them out of the smoky section, Jordan said.Ĭode-red closings were never definitive.
The fire damaged the entryway overhang and filled parts of the department with smoke, making it temporarily impossible to handle ambulance traffic. Unity Hospital called a code black several weeks ago after an ambulance left idling in its entryway overheated and caught fire. One color-code designation, code black, still is being used by area hospitals for circumstances that would create insurmountable physical barriers to accepting patients. "If a patient I know well comes into my ED, it doesn’t create that much work for me," he said. "If you bring somebody in as an emergency patient who’s been under treatment somewhere else, they would be stabilized, but then they might not get the follow-up treatment they need," Jordan said.įor ED personnel, treating patients whose histories they know well is not burdensome even in periods of peak activity, Kamali said. In cases when patients have been under care at a hospital but are instead sent to a facility where they are unknown and their medical records are not on file, the color-code system could cause harm, he added.
The color-code system did not work well from an ED standpoint, either, said Michael Kamali M.D, acting chairman of emergency medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center. The system could be confusing for ambulance workers, who sometimes found code-red EDs to be less backed up than emergency rooms at hospitals whose EDs were supposed to be clear. In practice, the color-code system never worked well for EMS workers, said Tim Czapranski, Monroe County Emergency Medical Services Office administrator.
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