New Hampshire hospitals are working together to improve safety by standardizing the colors they use to identify a patient’s status or particular risk.
Hospitals often use color-coded wristbands to identify patients who have allergies, Do Not Resuscitate orders or who are at risk of falling. But those colors vary among facilities, creating the potential for confusion when doctors and nurses work at more than one hospital or patients are transferred.
To eliminate that confusion, the Foundation for Health Communities helped get hospitals to agree to standardize the colors they use. The new wristbands will be unveiled at a news conference Tuesday at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester.