Banding Together for Patient Safety

Adding another level of protection for local patients, today St. John’s Hospital-Lebanon announced it has joined hospitals across Missouri to adopt new standards to prevent medical confusion. Banding Together for Patient Safety is designed to provide consistent information to healthcare professionals across the state.

More than 90 percent of Missouri hospitals use colored wristbands as a means of quickly identifying important information about patients. Wristbands are commonly used for alerts such as allergy warnings, fall risks, or do-not-resuscitate orders. 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. The inconsistent meanings on wristbands make it conceivable that someone will make a mistake.” Says Rebecca Wilson, Banding Together Project Coordinator at St. John’s Hospital-Lebanon. “As more staff work in more than one place, it has become a patient safety issue.”

A survey by the Missouri Center for Patient Safety identified 21 different colors which designate as many as 29 different clinical conditions. For example, seven separate colors are currently being used by different facilities to identify do-not-resuscitate orders.

To help prevent such an error locally, St. John’s Hospital-Lebanon and others statewide are accepting voluntary wristband standards.  In the standards, a yellow wristband alerts a fall risk, a red band represents an allergy warning, and purple indicates do-not-resuscitate orders.

“Before the Missouri Center for Patient Safety introduced these standards, there was no directive for hospitals to follow. With over 100 hospitals in the state, each was building their own system,” says Wilson. “This consistent system will make it easier for our medical staff to practice the art of medicine.”

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.