Alarm Fatigue and the Design of the Legacy Way Control Room
Introduction
The design of a control room is a critical aspect of ensuring the safety in many industries where data and sensors are prevalent, and having pure human monitoring is difficult or impractical. The national energy grid, petroleum refinery facilities, and railways are a few of the industries that rely on a control room to ensure the smooth and safe functioning of the system. In Brisbane Australia, the Legacy Way tunnel has a control room to monitor the state of the tunnel, and provide quick and reliable information and changes to ensure traffic flows smoothly, and that risks are mitigated. The Legacy Way tunnel control room, like many others, features auditory and visual …show more content…
The increasing prevalence of technology in the medical field has resulted in the number of unique alarms increasing almost seven-fold between 1983 and 2011(Deb & Claudio, 2015). Issues relating specifically to the number of alarms were identified as early as 1983 when Kerr and Hayes (1983) found that patients could have more than six individual alarms from the monitoring technology. A nurse or caregiver could easily become confused trying to identify what alarm was sounding, lengthening their response time. In March 2013, 77 ICU beds were monitored for a total of 48,173 hours across 31 days (Drew et al., 2014). The number of audio and visual alarms recorded was 2,558,760, with each bed experiencing an average of 187 audible alarms per day. Alarm accuracy in the study was as low as 5% with activities such as the patient brushing their teeth triggering a false alarm. Further, some alarms were for symptoms that had no assigned treatment, resulting in them being classified as “nuisance alarms”, serving no practical purpose. In recent years a number of high profile organisations and agencies have begun to bring attention to the risks that alarm fatigue poses (Mitka, 2013; Deb & Claudio, 2015). The manufacturers and national standards are also changing the recommended …show more content…
The control room is staffed by two operators, at each of the two ‘stations’ within the control room. There is also one external station situated behind the control room, capable of viewing the screens through the glass wall. The stations are positioned in such a way that when the operator is sitting, the lower quarter of the screen wall is obscured by the displays on their desks. The operator therefor is limited in the amount of information provided to the when they are in the sitting position, and rely only on the system to alert them if anything out of the ordinary
Introduction
The design of a control room is a critical aspect of ensuring the safety in many industries where data and sensors are prevalent, and having pure human monitoring is difficult or impractical. The national energy grid, petroleum refinery facilities, and railways are a few of the industries that rely on a control room to ensure the smooth and safe functioning of the system. In Brisbane Australia, the Legacy Way tunnel has a control room to monitor the state of the tunnel, and provide quick and reliable information and changes to ensure traffic flows smoothly, and that risks are mitigated. The Legacy Way tunnel control room, like many others, features auditory and visual …show more content…
The increasing prevalence of technology in the medical field has resulted in the number of unique alarms increasing almost seven-fold between 1983 and 2011(Deb & Claudio, 2015). Issues relating specifically to the number of alarms were identified as early as 1983 when Kerr and Hayes (1983) found that patients could have more than six individual alarms from the monitoring technology. A nurse or caregiver could easily become confused trying to identify what alarm was sounding, lengthening their response time. In March 2013, 77 ICU beds were monitored for a total of 48,173 hours across 31 days (Drew et al., 2014). The number of audio and visual alarms recorded was 2,558,760, with each bed experiencing an average of 187 audible alarms per day. Alarm accuracy in the study was as low as 5% with activities such as the patient brushing their teeth triggering a false alarm. Further, some alarms were for symptoms that had no assigned treatment, resulting in them being classified as “nuisance alarms”, serving no practical purpose. In recent years a number of high profile organisations and agencies have begun to bring attention to the risks that alarm fatigue poses (Mitka, 2013; Deb & Claudio, 2015). The manufacturers and national standards are also changing the recommended …show more content…
The control room is staffed by two operators, at each of the two ‘stations’ within the control room. There is also one external station situated behind the control room, capable of viewing the screens through the glass wall. The stations are positioned in such a way that when the operator is sitting, the lower quarter of the screen wall is obscured by the displays on their desks. The operator therefor is limited in the amount of information provided to the when they are in the sitting position, and rely only on the system to alert them if anything out of the ordinary