Professional Documents
Culture Documents
instruments and equipment that can be used to save life of a patient (or a
person), in case of medical emergency such as heart attack. In hospital
there is always a risk of a patient undergoing cardiac arrest and hence it is
important to have crash cart trolleys stationed at appropriate places for the
code blue team to use it on the patient, whenever required. (Code blue
team is a dedicated trained team of doctors and nurses, who can perform
basic and advanced life support function on patient who has undergone a
cardiac arrest).
In-order to ensure that crash cart is usable whenever required some
policies and practices needs to be put into place. It is also important that
crash cart contains all things that may be required during a medical
emergency. The checklist below can be used for this purpose.
Bottom Basket
Large Gloves
Defibrillator Pads
Adult Multi-function Electrodes
Pediatric Multi-function Electrodes
Surgical Cone Mask
Maintaining crash cart: It is important that the items listed in the checklist
above is available in crash cart all the time. For this purpose, hospital
should have a policy of not using crash cart medicines or other items for
routine patient care purpose. Also, whenever the crash cart has been used
for handling emergency, the used items should be replenished
immediately after that. Hospital should designate a person to ensure that
the crash cart contains all required items and is replenished whenever
used. Periodically the medicines should also be checked for its expiry
date and replaced if required.
Some hospitals seal the crash cart with a plastic wrap, to prevent its use in
routine cases. This is however not recommended, as it can just increase
the time to access its materials in case of emergency. A small paper tape
on edges of drawer can be put which doesn’t restrict its opening, but tears
off, letting others know that the crash cart was opened.
A copy of checklist should be kept on the crash cart for monitoring purpose
Staff training: While code blue team is the main user of crash cart, all
healthcare staff should know about it and should be able to perform at-least
basic life support activities. Policies and procedure of maintaining crash
cart should be known to all.