Alarm Fatigue : A Worldwide Professional Organization Essay

Alarm fatigue is a growing national problem within the health care industry that links medical technology as a serious hazard that poses a significant threat to patient safety within hospitals across the country. Alarm fatigue occurs when nurses encounter an overwhelming amount of alarms thus becoming desensitized to the firing alarms. Alarm desensitization is a multifaceted issue that is related to the number of alarming medical devices, a high false alarm rate, and the lack of alarm standardization in hospitals today (Cvach, 2012). Desensitization can lead to delayed response times, alarms silenced or turned off, or alarms adjusted to unsafe limits, which can create a dangerous situation for the patient. Alarm fatigue

Alarm fatigue in health care has grown to be an ever-growing concern in the health care arena, especially when looking at patient safety concerns. There must be an understanding of the problem before we can develop policies and effective strategies to counter this problem. The concept of alarm fatigue in health care will be evaluated utilizing the method developed by Walker and Avant (2010) that identifies and gives the significance of the attributes, antecedents, and end-consequences of alarm fatigue in health care. This will be developed based

Clinical alarm systems in acute and critical care health care settings are an assistive way to maintain communication between the client and the nurse. Awareness and comprehension of health devices is crucial to provide nurses with appropriate strategies for critical or non critical interventions that can lead to sentinel events. The ECRI, a nonprofit institute, has identified alarm hazards as the “Top Ten Health Technology Hazards” for 2014. (cite) In 2013 The Joint Commission published a Sentinel Event Alert proposing a National Safety Goal to focus on alarm safety (cite). This topic is pertinent information to be recognized and set as an achievable action in improving patient safety.

Horkan, A. M. (2014). Exploring the Evidence Alarm Fatigue and Patient Safety. Nephrology Nursing Journal, 41(1), 83-85.

The continued shortage of registered nurses will be a catalyst for the increasing stress placed upon practicing nurses now and in the future. Mandatory overtime has been an incessant problem within the nursing profession. When lives are at risk, alertness is a critical part of a nurse’s job performance. Fatigue impairs one’s judgement directly affecting patient and nursing safety or outcomes. This author’s typical six week work schedule consists of eighteen-twelve hour shifts, nine “required” twelve hour call shifts, and three-four hour back-up shifts. A nurse that accepts a patient assignment in the operating room cannot legally or ethically leave when their shift has ended without proper relief. Inevitably, without proper staffing departure is not an

Alarm fatigue is out of control, and patients are being harmed, if not killed. Alarm fatigue is a disturbing subject in healthcare and primarily in the acute care setting in all institutions. In the acute care setting, alarm fatigue is the constant barrage of noise consisting of an excessive amount of information being communicated by medical devices such as blood pressure, intravenous pumps, and electrocardiogram machines. Alarm fatigue is a nationwide concern and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience database received 566 details of patient deaths related to medical device alarms between 2005 and 2008 (Bai et al., 2014). Deaths are normally attributed to the physiological or chronic health of the individual, not alarm fatigue. In 2010, an analysis exposed 73 alarm-related deaths with 33 directly linked to physiologic monitors (Cvach, 2013). Routinely alarms are intended to warn the clinician to situations that deviate from what is conceived as ‘normal’ for the patient, not a stressful, irritating barrage of noise.

crucial in the safety of patients. The Informatic Nurse Specialist along with the nurse manager and alarm committee will individualize and customize alarm thresholds to limits that are clinically appropriate for individual patients to decrease the incidence of nuisance and false alarms that distract staff members and contribute to alarm fatigue ( Cvach,2012; Evans,Shumante & Lovelace, 2011). Staff will be re-educated on the appropriate use of alarm systems to help minimize the effects of nuisance and false alarms. When staff are appropriately trained on how to fully utilize equipment, clinically signicant

reduce risks from nurse fatigue and to create and sustain a culture of safety, a

Fatigue and sleepiness, tendency to fall asleep, go hand in hand as nurses struggle to stay awake during long, consecutive, day or night shifts. For example, in the Staff Nurse Fatigue and Patient Safety Study, the number of nurses who reported an error or a near miss had less hours of sleep than the nurses who did not report an error or a near miss, and it was determined that there is a 3.4 percent chance of a nursing error when nurses get 6 hours of sleep or less in the prior 24 hours; another study found that the chances of making an error was three times higher when nurses worked more than 12.5 hours per shift (Rogers, 2008). In the Staff Nurse Fatigue and Patient Safety Study, over two thirds of the participants reported that they struggle to stay awake while working and 20 percent reported incidence of falling asleep during their shift (Rogers, 2008). Nurses also do not get adequate breaks while working long shifts, according to the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) less than 50% of work breaks for are away from patient care, which means nurses never truly get a chance to relax (Phillips, 2014). Not only is the patient safety at risk when nurses are fatigued, but the well being of nurses is at stake as well. While nurses are fatigued they are risking their

Alarm fatigue is a critical problem in health care setting. Nurses may not respond to alarms because they know that most of them are false or non-actionable. Sometimes, the alarms become the noises that nurses no longer hear because they are heard all the time. In addition to ignore alarms, nurses may also reduce audible alarm levels, change alarm limits, and inappropriately silence or deactivate alarms (Cvach, 2012). The alarm fatigue has led to sentinel events and deaths of patients (Cvach, 2012). Therefore, the alarm fatigue problem has to be fixed in order to improve patient safety. This paper will introduce interventions based on evidence-based practices and leadership theories related to alarm fatigue prevention.

Safe nurse-patient ratio is a complex issue debated on for many years. Due to inadequate staffing registered Nurses are faced with high patient ratios, and nurse burn out everyday. According to the American Nurses Association, “Massive Reductions in nursing budgets combined with, the challenges presented by a growing nursing shortage have resulted in fewer nurses working longer hours for sicker patients. This situation compromises care and contributes to the nursing shortage by creating an environment that drives nurses from the bedside”. (2012) Through the nurse’s process, the essential role of the Registered Nurse is to assess, diagnose, and plan based on outcomes, implement and evaluate the effectiveness of nursing care. However, it is not realistic to thoroughly implement these core guidelines in a safe and effective way, when you are responsible for an inadequate patient load.

The article that was chosen to write about is alarm fatigue. This article talks about all the alarms that go off on a daily basis, and the implications that can occur, such as patient death, due to the fact that, they may be ignored and not answering them. This can be very scary since it could happen on any units such as the one where the respiratory therapist works. Also, as a result of the implementation of the new charting system, which is very time-consuming, it becomes difficult to attend to the ventilator, when the alarm goes off. The article also stated that based on one research, found 72% to 99.4% of alarms that go off are false, which creates a “cry wolf” situation in which staff will respond to the alarm the percentage of time they

According to the Joint Commission 2014, clinical alarm systems are designed to alert staff for any potential patient problems, but they can jeopardize the patient safety, if they are not managed and responded properly. Nurses are known for their ability of multitasking, but everything has a limit. Due to multiple interruptions and distractions, including alarms systems, nurses develop alarm fatigue and try to tune them out and ignore them. "Alarm fatigue occurs when clinicians become desensitized and nonreactive to the sensory overload created by an overwhelming number of alarms, many of which are nuisance or non-actionable alarms” (NACNS 2013-2014).

Eric, thank you for choosing such a significant topic for your paper. Alarm fatigue is a big problem in the healthcare field. Sentinel events related to alarm fatigue is something that is totally preventable. It’s interesting our body gets trained and used to hearing certain sounds after awhile where we don’t find these sounds even bothersome. Or we have developed a way to block out these sounds and still stay focus on our task at hand. If an alarm has the option, I like to change my patient’s alarm sound to a sound that I don’t hear often so that way it quickly catches my attention and my coworkers as well during my shift. I work in the ICU where I am closely monitoring my two patients and every bed has a bed alarm built inside the mattress.

The alarms on clinical devices have the intended purpose of calling the caregiver’s attention to patient or device situations that require the caregiver to intervene. This intervention may be with respect to the patient’s condition, or to correct some aspect of the operation of the medical device. An example of a patient issue is low heart rate while an example of an equipment issue is a leads-off alarm. Alarm situations may be urgent in that the patient’s well being would be compromised if there were not a quick response. In other situations there may be little or no urgency, although the situation still requires attention. An unfortunate aspect of most clinical alarms is that the sounds that they make do not usually distinguish urgent situations