Question: What is the new code “OB Stat room number” we’ve been hearing lately?
Answer, from Lisa Ketchum, Interim Director, Women & Children’s Services:
The OB Stat Team was developed by Women’s and Children’s Services last year to quickly respond to obstetric patients during medical emergencies. Cheryl Lugenbill, MD, and Cindy Davis, neonatal nurse practitioner helped to develop the stat team process. The team includes the OB hospitalist, the OB anesthesiologist, an L&D nurse, the L&D charge nurse, a neonatal nurse practitioner, the NICU resuscitation nurse, the NICU respiratory therapist and the NICU charge nurse.
Examples of emergencies: the need for an emergent delivery, maternal hypertensive crisis, and postpartum hemorrhage. The OB Stat Team is activated by dialing 77 and asking for the OB Stat Team and providing the switchboard with the patient’s location.
Until recently, the switchboard notified the OB Stat Team through pagers that each team member carries. To improve the ability of each OB Stat Team member to respond as quickly as possible and to create redundancy in the process, we have been trialing having the team paged overhead (similar to Code Blue pages). While we have only been trialing this process for a few weeks, so far results are promising. We plan to continue to evaluate the team’s response times (in both drills and actual events) utilizing the overhead pages in addition to paging team members.
One unexpected result of having OB Stat Team paged overhead has been having additional staff respond to the OB Stat event. Only those team members listed above need to respond to these pages. If the situation continues to escalate and additional resources are needed, the team leader will request the appropriate response (such as the Code Blue team).