Distractions And Interruptions In Health Care

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

Problem. In modern-day acute care settings, interruptions occur as part of normal work flow. Technology driven task performance intermingles with interpersonal communication, patient care needs, medication administration and distraction within one’s mind. When a task requires attention to detail or a significant amount of our attention, an interruption can be devastating to a patient, the person carrying out the task and the facility they are employed within. In healthcare literature research, a consistent definition of the term interruption was difficult to ascertain. Identifying a consistent definition would support research designed to support a link between interruptions and medical error.

Gill P.S., Kamath A., & Gill T.S. (2012). Distraction: an assessment of smartphone usage in health care work settings. Risk Manage Healthcare Policy 5(9), 105–114. doi: 10.2147/RMHP.S34813

a. The LPN was engaged in caring for the emergency transport patient along with the RN and was also in the process of discharging the other two patients. 3. Why did the LPN not notify the RN of the alarm and reading? a. With the information provided, it appears that the LPN was distracted as well as did not follow her scope of practice.

In today’s hospital environment, our main focus is placed on technology, medications and treating a diagnosis. Often patients are wheeled from one examination to another with little personal interaction received from their healthcare provider. Patients are hooked up to monitors alarming endlessly due to staff being either unavailable to silence them or not having the compassion to comfort. Technology has become so dominant in hospital settings that we have lost sight of providing the

A key problem arising from the use of monitoring devices is the false alarm. False alarms, or nuisance alarms, are generated from a variety of causes, i.e. ECG alarms can tend to go off due to low battery warnings (AAMI, 2011). Linda Bell, Clinical Practice Specialist at the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses points out that more often than not, alarms will sound whenever a patient changes position, coughs, or sneezes; essentially, the slightest change in a patient can set an alarm off (Wallis, 2010). This tends to cause a high frequency of alarms that may go off at any given time. The AAMI 2011 Summit on Clinical Alarms reported,

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.

When Death needs a distraction from “the leftover humans”. The leftover humans consist of the survivors of war or death. They carry around the guilt of continuing on while others do not. They feel that it should have been them who died, not the ones who did. An example from the book is Michael Holtzapfel. Michael’s story began with his brothers death. He blamed himself, though it was no way his fault. When he left his mother and enters the shelter, he feels even worse for having wanting to live. Finally, he hangs himself for wanting to live.

Our primary competitor in the inpatient domain is the incumbent solution of allocating a patient sitter position, at a cost of $10,000/bed/month. The next best solution that leverages technology is provided by AvaSure—with its AvaSys “telesitter” product. The “telesitter” is in fact a live human sitter that the hospital merely relocates into an office to watch over a collection of monitors, each showing the video feed of 8 to 12 different beds. If a patient is seen to be pulling out IV lines, getting out of bed, or otherwise needs assistance, the telesitter is trained to alert the nursing team and will try to call out via a speaker placed next to the camera – a potentially jarring experience for the patient not expecting a disembodied voice

Connecting safety through communication with the help of informatics can lead to providing effective nursing care. Informatics is an expanding topic with technology being integrated more and more into health care with examples like tele health and interactive games. Therefore, the focus then changes to providing safe quality client care by gathering information. Having backup generators, and implementing a firewall system can also aid in the safe guarding of client information. Critical thinking is a skill that is used constantly in the health care field and when it comes to technology the same skill is beneficial. Coming up with new ideas on how to improve by observing what is not working is how I will make a difference for client safety measures.

Hospitals and pharmacies need to find a solution to facilitate their job when dealing with people that are non-adherent. This solution could be communicating and explaining the patient the importance of consuming the medicine correctly; this will also help the patient by reminding them the time periods and pharmacists will have no further difficulties with those who forget. By writing this paper I have learned that the solution I am creating may have a lot of pros and cons to it, but I am sure I can improve the device some way to make all the bad things about it disappear such as any software problems like not connecting or lagging. Some of the pros are the way the device will function, and how the pharmacists will be the only ones able to program the device so that way the patients cannot change or damage the system of the watch. Another good thing about the device will be the material, in which it will not break easily; it will last a long time. There are few questions that may be asked by the pharmacists such as, how long can the device stay on before it dies? What type of battery will it use? What type of programs will it need to function and how much money will the government have to spend to create these devices? In this paper I have thought about what the device will include to help the patients in need, what they may see on the device and how it will

Distraction is one of the most detrimental effects of technologies on our daily life. While these devices such as computers,

Fire-EMS agencies and their patients face the risk that medics in the field—relying on their software systems and expecting them to perform the critical job of collecting, storing, and transmitting patient data—will be distracted by or unprepared for system

Effective AAL solutions have the potential to be inherently dynamic and able to complement, interactively, the human care providers, which assumes an increasing importance due to the need to optimize both effectiveness and efficiency of the health and social care systems. However, a special attention should be given to devices and applications that, by nature and if non-critical aspects are safeguarded, have the potential to be a source of harm in normal use or if misused and, therefore, should be considered as medical devices.

Medical Equipment Interoperability. The project team evaluated the five primary types of medical equipment systems that were determined that interoperability would be critical by NICU clinicians for effective communication. Ouellette (2017) investigated critical medical equipment to determine the feasibility for integration with alarm management middleware and mobile applications. The NICU clinical team identified the Phillips patient monitoring, pumps, incubator, ventilator and the nurse call as medical equipment that is vital to their workflow.