Monitor Alarm Fatigue: Preventing a Sentinel Event
Nicholas D’Amario
Carroll Community College
Abstract
Nurses working on monitored patient units hear the sounding alarms coming from cardiac monitors on a daily basis and overtime can become desensitized to these signals. Becoming immune to the sound of alarms may put a nurse’s patient in danger if the alarm results from a critical condition. These alarms are set in place to alert nurses to potential problems with a patient, however; fatigue from the overwhelming number of alarms encountered during a shift may actually result in alarms being disabled or silenced. Despite the numerous alarms that register on these units, an estimated 85-95% prove to be false alarms requiring no urgent …show more content…
Graham and Cvach (2010) report that the high rate of false alarms are the main contributor to alarm fatigue in nurses and require intervention less than 1 percent of the time. Cardiac alarms are put in place to alert nurses to changes in patients’ conditions, however; fear that nurses become desensitized to the alarms over time raises concern about patient safety. Clinicians who fail to respond to the alarms in a timely manner put their patients at risk, especially when the alarm indicates a patient is deteriorating. Sendelbach, Funk, & Tracy (2013) report the example of a case in which a patient’s monitor alarm softly rang for 75 minutes before being attended to. The patient eventually went into cardiac arrest and was unable to be resuscitated. Due to the ever growing nature of modern medicine, more and more medical equipment is put into practice and cardiac monitors are not the only source for alarms. Patients today may be utilizing mechanical ventilators, infusion and feeding pumps, pulse oximeters, and specialty hospital beds, all which may produce different alarms for nurses to be aware of (Sendelbach et. al, 2013). It is for this reason that comprehensive training and routine competency updates are essential to ensure that nurses are equipped to handle these devices. Additionally, health care facilities have implemented means to reduce false alarm events which in turn should slow the inevitable alarm fatigue in
Nicholas D’Amario
Carroll Community College
Abstract
Nurses working on monitored patient units hear the sounding alarms coming from cardiac monitors on a daily basis and overtime can become desensitized to these signals. Becoming immune to the sound of alarms may put a nurse’s patient in danger if the alarm results from a critical condition. These alarms are set in place to alert nurses to potential problems with a patient, however; fatigue from the overwhelming number of alarms encountered during a shift may actually result in alarms being disabled or silenced. Despite the numerous alarms that register on these units, an estimated 85-95% prove to be false alarms requiring no urgent …show more content…
Graham and Cvach (2010) report that the high rate of false alarms are the main contributor to alarm fatigue in nurses and require intervention less than 1 percent of the time. Cardiac alarms are put in place to alert nurses to changes in patients’ conditions, however; fear that nurses become desensitized to the alarms over time raises concern about patient safety. Clinicians who fail to respond to the alarms in a timely manner put their patients at risk, especially when the alarm indicates a patient is deteriorating. Sendelbach, Funk, & Tracy (2013) report the example of a case in which a patient’s monitor alarm softly rang for 75 minutes before being attended to. The patient eventually went into cardiac arrest and was unable to be resuscitated. Due to the ever growing nature of modern medicine, more and more medical equipment is put into practice and cardiac monitors are not the only source for alarms. Patients today may be utilizing mechanical ventilators, infusion and feeding pumps, pulse oximeters, and specialty hospital beds, all which may produce different alarms for nurses to be aware of (Sendelbach et. al, 2013). It is for this reason that comprehensive training and routine competency updates are essential to ensure that nurses are equipped to handle these devices. Additionally, health care facilities have implemented means to reduce false alarm events which in turn should slow the inevitable alarm fatigue in