Among the many emergency codes in hospitals, a code black is one of the most intense types of emergencies. Whenever a bomb threat is called into a hospital, the code gets declared – indicating that it is necessary for staff at the hospital to begin quickly evacuating hundreds or thousands of people from the facility without causing a panic. As you can imagine, in a hospital with a large number of patients that have varying needs and abilities, this can be an incredibly difficult task.
A bomb threat emergency response can be enhanced with help from a digital mass notification solution, which can assist with notifying hospital stakeholders of the code black situation and making sure evacuation protocols and emergency management procedures can be efficiently deployed - protocols which are especially critical for any hospitals with intensive care patients.
A digital solution for managing the response to a bomb threat can greatly reduce the risk of confusion and miscommunication during the emergency and ensure the safety of patients and staff members.
There are four steps to enhancing the response for any hospital.
1. Create a Hospital Database
It is absolutely critical that your hospital's emergency department or administration have a record of all your hospital staff’s contact information in an easy-to-access location during a code black. The last thing you will want to be doing is making sure you are able to contact all the correct stakeholders in this emergency scenario.
With a digital code black emergency response solution, you are able to store all the information for staff members (such as their names, their contact information, their role at the hospital, and any other piece of information you need) in a central contact database that can easily be accessed in the event a code black is declared.
2. Develop Message Templates
The next step of digitizing the response to a code black for hospitals is creating a set of alert message templates that can be deployed at a moment’s notice. Templates help ensure that hospital staff do not need to waste valuable time composing a message.
It is a good idea to create a few different alert message templates to account for any variances that may occur during a code black, as well as a final “all clear” notification that can be sent once the situation has been resolved. It is important that each alert message contain all the important information necessary for responding to the emergency – such as the urgency of the evacuation, gathering locations for staff and patients, and any precautionary measures that should be taken.
3. Activate Alerts
Now that the contact database and alert message templates set up, your hospital is prepared to immediately notify the appropriate stakeholders if they ever need to call a code black. These alerts can be configured to deploy over different communication channels, such as email, SMS, and phone call, helping to ensure that hospital staff receive them as quickly as possible.
4. Analyze Reports
After a code black is resolved, the digital emergency response solution will generate a report which will provide you with important details and information regarding the alerts that were sent, such as the open rate, click-through rate, and who acknowledged the alerts and when.
These reports will help you measure the effectiveness of your code black emergency response and will provide you with helpful insights into where you may need to improve your alert messaging in order to ensure that your hospital staff are notified as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
Wondering how to improve your response to a code black for your hospital?
If your hospital is looking to enhance your code black emergency response process, SimplyCast has built a solution using our contact management, and mass notification tools that can assist with notifying stakeholders. The solution can be customized to meet the requirements of any hospital in order to ensure that everyone is notified as efficiently as possible to maximize staff and patient safety.
There are a whole host of use cases for all of the color codes within the code system, and other non-emergency hospital solutions such as bed manager solutions.
Click the button below to request a one-on-one demo from our team to see how you can use SimplyCast’s code black emergency response alert solution! You can also ask about other types of emergency response plans, inlcuding code red fire, code blue cardiac arrest, and code orange mass casualty emergencies.
