Does Code Blue Do Anything??

[Garavar]

Honestly? I don't see a difference in pressing it or not.

Today I had a patient who had blood in lungs (Forgot medical term) she was collapsing. I put her code blue and order ventilation.

20 game minutes later no doc. I click on her doctor see what he is doing and he is "putting ice wrap on patient B"

Seriously? Ice wrap dude? It could wait.

He finishes the wrap finally comes to collapsed patient does his thing. Orders thoracentesis cause it's flashing and the cause of her collapse.

Nurse comes and transfer patient to HDU in IM. She lays in her bed "waiting for transport to treatment"

Really guys? Why not transfer her from trauma center right to surgery? It's a code blue the blood in lungs is killing her.

While waiting for transfer to Surgery of course she collapses again and dies on way to ICU.

I don't get it what's point of pressing code blue? What does it do?

I thought it would put priority over all other patients and skip all the "waiting for this" and "waiting for that" similar to priority on surgery.

[Silent Ember]

I find that Code Blue works really well to bump patients up the waiting list at the clinic. When a patient prompts the "about to leave" notification, I turn on Code Blue and they are called in by the next available doctor who doesn't have a patient reserved, overruling the normal queue. If my clinic is too full, I also use that to prioritize patients who have return from lab examinations, so that they don't have to wait in line all over again to get treated.

I don't have that much experience with Code Blue in hospitalization. I noticed that Code Blue patients get bumped up the surgery list, provided the surgical team is available (and not reserved for surgery).

I think collapses are Code Blue by default (but I might be wrong), so triggering it might not have an additional effect. If a doctor was reserved for apply an ice wrap when the collapse happened, they will complete the procedure before tending to the collapsed patient. If you had to wait for 20 minutes and your doctor was still applying the ice wrap, that might imply the doctor had to wait a long time for the ice wrap patient to arrive, or that the doctor had to walk a long distance from the On Call Room to the ward/diagnostic room. You can minimize this by hiring more doctors and nurses, buying more stretchers, and building rooms closer together.

You are right when you say that transporting the patient immediately to the special procedures unit would make much more sense. Unfortunately, the game doesn't have a separate mechanism to handle hospitalization transfers for collapsed patients. That means that whenever you transfer a TC patient to a specific department, that patient will first be transported to the HDU ward, and only then moved to other rooms for procedures. You just have to build and staff your hospital with that in mind.

[vonMoo]

Originally posted by Garavar:

Does Code Blue Do Anything??

Honestly? I don't see a difference in pressing it or not.

What it does is allow the patient to jump ahead to the front of the queue. And I think that End Lancaster is right about it not prioritising above other collapses or high hazard patients.

What code blue doesn't do is reserve staff ahead of time in all the next stages of the chain of actions the patient needs.

For cases like the one you mentioned it might be helpful to do a manual transfer from the TC to the ICU, if there is a firm diagnosis. The reasons being that the ICU is the best place to try to keep critical patients alive( especially if it's staffed by anaesthesiologists), the ICU can transport patients directly to specialised treatment such as thorocentesis or surgery, and the ICU usually doesn't have the intra-departmental chaos and delays that occur at busy times. ICU also reserves staff in other departments for these procedures when that's necessary and jumps the queue.


A different trick that might be applicable is if a department has say, two doctors and doctor A is busy and B is idle manually change your patient from doctor A to B if that's applicable. Sometimes the game just seems to assign your patient to the doctor who's just started walking towards a lengthy treatment procedure.

Originally posted by End Lancaster:

I find that Code Blue works really well to bump patients up the waiting list at the clinic. When a patient prompts the "about to leave" notification, I turn on Code Blue and they are called in by the next available doctor who doesn't have a patient reserved, overruling the normal queue. If my clinic is too full, I also use that to prioritize patients who have return from lab examinations, so that they don't have to wait in line all over again to get treated.

I do this too, it's usually pretty effective.

Originally posted by End Lancaster:

I think collapses are Code Blue by default (but I might be wrong), so triggering it might not have an additional effect. If a doctor was reserved for apply an ice wrap when the collapse happened, they will complete the procedure before tending to the collapsed patient. If you had to wait for 20 minutes and your doctor was still applying the ice wrap, that might imply the doctor had to wait a long time for the ice wrap patient to arrive, or that the doctor had to walk a long distance from the On Call Room to the ward/diagnostic room. You can minimize this by hiring more doctors and nurses, buying more stretchers, and building rooms closer together.

Indeed. And if the code blue patient has several steps in their chain of transport, treatments and/or diagnostics these little delays combine.

[Garavar]

Best Advise I've ever received in forum from the above two posters.

Pressing code blue after "long wait" alert works wonders.

And transfer from Trauma to ICU then scheduling thoracentesis saves patient from dying. I tried it on a save and it worked perfectly.

Patient stabilized then transferred to IM for procedure dies vs patient stabilized transfer to ICU then procedure lives.