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Emergency Services
Establishing a Newborn Emergency Code
Caleb’s Story
Right Place, Right Time
With the right personnel on site and the right equipment in place, Tri-City Medical Center diagnosed and resuscitated 3-day-old Caleb Peltier.
This life-saving care showed the need for a special code for medical emergencies involving infants.
Learn about Caleb’s story and our experience with Code Caleb.
How Code Caleb was Created
Tri-City Medical Center has had a newborn emergency code since April 2012. We identified the need in 2010 and spent a year and a half developing the policy and procedures we are sharing here for the benefit of other hospitals and their tiniest patients.
FAQs
The tools, dosages and expertise needed to diagnose and treat infants are specialized, and, therefore, any hospital with a neonatal care unit needs a code that brings its neonatal physicians and nurses to the emergency department immediately.
Consider also that while pediatric emergency codes are called regularly, only a tiny fraction are called for infants.
This is a high risk, low frequency patient population.
The code should also be treated as one segment of a continuum of care that starts in the field. When first responders receive training from hospital experts, it can also enhance neonatal survival and recovery.
Tri-City found that when EMT’s had been trained in care for babies in cardiac-pulmonary arrest, they worked to keep their body temperatures up during transportation. Any eventually might result in the code being called in the field.
For more information, please refer to Tri-City Medical Center’s Code Caleb policy.
It might also require equipping the hospital’s emergency room with a neonatal resuscitation cart with tools that are the right size for tiny patients.
- “Life-threatening disease does not discriminate” – The Daily Transcript, Feb 8, 2013
- “Infant heart testing law cheered by parents, doctors” – U-T San Diego, Sept. 18, 2012
- “Bill to save newborns from heart disease inspired by local family” – 10News, Sept. 17, 2012
- “Bill advances to compel heart test for newborns” – U-T San Diego, June 11, 2012
- “Vista newborn inspires bill to help children” – U-T San Diego, June 8, 2012