A Phenomenological Study of the Lived Experiences of Hospital Staff in "Code White" on New Year's Celebration

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Hospitals worldwide deliver important information in a short period of time using Hospital Color Codes. Code white, a color code used by foreign hospitals, are assigned to different situations which include violent patients, respiratory arrests, and terror attacks. However, Philippine hospitals assigned code white to mass or national events that may result to emergency situations may occur. Some good examples of these situations are the Black Nazarene Event and New Year's Eve celebration. However, there is a shortage of studies published that focused about the experience of Filipino hospital staff when Code White alert is raised.

METHODS

The population of the study was hospital staff in the Philippines who were in duty when code white was raised during the New Year's Eve celebration and then a purposive sampling was used to select participants who are well-informed about the phenomenon. Five hospital staffs were interviewed using a semi-structured, in-depth interview. The participants were interviewed in their offices and with their permission, were audio-recorded. The data and personal information gathered from the participants will be kept confidential and will only be used for research purposes only.

RESULTS

The data from the study were gathered by the researchers by means of reading and analysis of the transcript of the interviews with the participants. This leads into a several themes namely Immediate response of the Hospital staff to the patients; and Coping mechanism of Hospital staff to the different issues that arose. As an outcome, different ways of responding to the patients were stated in which the responses were all related to the traits of the hospital staff. It was revealed that being patient and having a good mind set are the characteristics that a hospital staff must have especially when assigned in an emergency room. Meanwhile on the Coping mechanism of Hospital staff, it was revealed that controlling the situation and encouraging other staff are one of their trained responses in terms of coping up with issues.

DISCUSSIONS

There results revealed the different immediate response of the Hospital Staff to the patients and on how they cope up with the different issues that arose from the Code White. Interview with the participants revealed that in terms of facing the call of duty, it is needed to act as a professional, to have a presence of mind, focus, be confident, and the most important is to always smile.