The Problem of Alarm Fatigue
Introduction:
Enter any emergency room or hospital floor, and you will most likely find yourself accompanied with the sounds of beeps, chimes, and dings. Sounds are from the multitude of medical monitors and equipment being used to protect and keep patients alive. Alarms can be categorized as either physiological or technical. Physiological alarms are caused by a vital sign or patient conditions which has been deemed abnormal by the equipment or hospital. Technical alarms occur when there is something on the equipment that needs attention such as a defective part or a low battery.
Though both physiological and technical issues are important situations that need to be alerted to medical staff, many times the issues are not real or important issues collectively known as false alarms. A clinician must still attend each alert. False alarms place extra stress on medical professionals and take attention away from other issues. The more false alarms are triggered, the less the medical staff will believe the …show more content…
They have taken steps to improve the performance of medical equipment. Hospitals have seen reductions in their number of false positives by implementing better medical practices including daily ECG electrode changes, properly preparing the skin for monitoring, and customizing alarm parameter limits (Sendelbach & Funk, 2013). The FDA creates documents with requirements and recommendations for medical equipment in the United States. One attempt that was made with the intention of improving alarm recognition was a standardization of medical alarm sounds. These sounds should reflect the patient’s condition, as shown in Table 2 (ISO, 2006). However this has not found to be completely successful as one study found that only 38% of experienced nurses were able to differentiate the different alarm sounds (Cropp, Woods, & Bredle,
Introduction:
Enter any emergency room or hospital floor, and you will most likely find yourself accompanied with the sounds of beeps, chimes, and dings. Sounds are from the multitude of medical monitors and equipment being used to protect and keep patients alive. Alarms can be categorized as either physiological or technical. Physiological alarms are caused by a vital sign or patient conditions which has been deemed abnormal by the equipment or hospital. Technical alarms occur when there is something on the equipment that needs attention such as a defective part or a low battery.
Though both physiological and technical issues are important situations that need to be alerted to medical staff, many times the issues are not real or important issues collectively known as false alarms. A clinician must still attend each alert. False alarms place extra stress on medical professionals and take attention away from other issues. The more false alarms are triggered, the less the medical staff will believe the …show more content…
They have taken steps to improve the performance of medical equipment. Hospitals have seen reductions in their number of false positives by implementing better medical practices including daily ECG electrode changes, properly preparing the skin for monitoring, and customizing alarm parameter limits (Sendelbach & Funk, 2013). The FDA creates documents with requirements and recommendations for medical equipment in the United States. One attempt that was made with the intention of improving alarm recognition was a standardization of medical alarm sounds. These sounds should reflect the patient’s condition, as shown in Table 2 (ISO, 2006). However this has not found to be completely successful as one study found that only 38% of experienced nurses were able to differentiate the different alarm sounds (Cropp, Woods, & Bredle,