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Banding Together For Patient Safety
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In Missouri, healthcare providers are working together to make healthcare safer. One such effort, Banding Together for Patient Safety, is a project that encourages healthcare providers to use the same three colors for wristbands that are used in hospitals to designate high priority clinical conditions including allergies, fall risk and do not resuscitate orders. Nevada Regional Medical Center is proud to participate in this effort to improve communication and the safety of care provided to our patients.
Over 90 percent of Missouri hospitals use colored wristbands as a means of quickly identifying important information about patients. However, there is no standard in Missouri offering direction to hospitals as to what color identifies which alert. Because many health professionals work in multiple facilities, they must memorize multiple, sometimes conflicting, meanings for colors.
“In medicine, communication is vital. Having inconsistent meanings for these wristbands opens up the possibility for any number of mistakes. In the worst-case scenario, a patient could be mistaken for do-not-resuscitate when, in fact, they may have a latex allergy,” said Rebecca Miller, Executive Director of the Missouri Center for Patient Safety.
A survey by the Center identified nine separate colors used by hospitals in the state, each with multiple meanings across hospitals. Seven separate colors are currently being used by different facilities to identify do-not-resuscitate orders.
To counter this, the Missouri Center for Patient Safety introduced voluntary standards for Missouri’s hospitals. In the standards, a yellow wristband alerts a fall risk, a red band represents an allergy warning, and purple indicates do-not-resuscitate orders. In addition, words are included on the wristbands to further reduce the chance of confusion about the alert messages.
Many people wear “social cause” wristbands such as the yellow “Live Strong” bracelets, pink breast cancer awareness bracelets and others that support special causes. Missouri patients are asked to remove these wristbands while in the hospital to avoid any possible confusion among these bands and those used for purposes of health care.
Missouri is the eighth state to implement wristband standards and the only state in the Midwest. The colors selected for the Missouri program are consistent with the majority of states who have developed a standard.
The Missouri Center for Patient Safety is a private, not-for-profit corporation based in Jefferson City. Its mission is to improve health care quality and patient safety in collaboration with health care providers, physicians, purchasers, consumers and government.
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