Pharmacist participation on adult code blue teams: a quality improvement initiative

Introduction: Pharmacist participation on resuscitation teams is considered by the American Society of Health System Pharmacists to be an essential service that hospital pharmacy departments should provide.  There is little information available to help guide pharmacy departments regarding how to implement or expand this service. 

Objectives: This quality improvement initiative will identify best practice strategies to improve pharmacist participation on adult code blue teams at our institution.  Our primary aim for this initiative is to increase pharmacist participation on inpatient adult code blue teams to 100 percent by June 30, 2017.

Study Design: This is a prospective, quality improvement initiative. 

Methods: Our primary intervention consists of the development of an educational training program that each of our pharmacists will complete.  A survey is administered pre and post training to determine changes in confidence and competence.  Pharmacist participation at an adult respiratory and cardiac arrest will then be tracked via documentation in the patient’s electronic health record (EHR) to ensure that our primary aim is being accomplished.

Results: Pharmacist training is ongoing.  Approximately 50 percent (n=26) of our full-time inpatient pharmacy department has completed training so far.  Baseline data show that pharmacist competence level is high prior to training, and therefore is not anticipated to change significantly after training.  Preliminary analysis shows that pharmacist comfort scores improved from a mean of 3.5 to 4.1.  A median of 13 percent of adult respiratory and cardiac arrests have pharmacist attendance at baseline.  Over a three month period, attendance increased to approximately 40 percent.  This outcome will continue to be monitored.

Conclusions: After several training sessions pharmacist comfort level has improved, which we anticipate will assist in improving pharmacist participation at adult respiratory and cardiac arrests.