Icu Alarm Management

Inadequate nurse staffing has become a major issue when it comes to patient safety. Having a unit function with not enough staff not only puts patients at risk for adverse events, it also puts the nurse at risk for potential errors. In the following paragraphs, information will be provided on how changing the number of nurses on the unit, will improve patient care. Literature will be discussed and will provide evidence that changing nurse-patient ratios not only improves the quality of care the patient receives, it also decreases the chances of errors. A change theory will also be discussed and will explain how it helps implement change in a hospital setting and how it will be used to implement change. Finally information on how the inter-professional

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

378). Hospitals have an array of medical devices at the bedside that have alarms, which have grown significantly within recent years. Nurses may be exposed to over 350 physiologic alarm monitors per day, resulting in sensory overload thus leading to desensitization. When the alarm sounds it should be corrected immediately, even though it may be a false alarm or no issues with the patient. The Joint Commission has identified alarm fatigue as a 2014 National Patient Safety Goal, requiring hospitals “to establish improvement of alarm system safety as an organization priority” (as cited in Horkan, 2014, p. 83). Alarms are deliberately designed for high sensitivity so that nurses do not miss a true event. Firing alarms are usually muted, disabled or ignored by nurses altogether because alarms are viewed as a nuisance. Alarm hazards have generated national attention, in one highly publicized case an alarm sounded for 75 minutes before a nurse responded to a patient’s heart monitor that needed a battery replaced. When the nurse finally went to change the battery the patient was found unresponsive and could not be resuscitated because he had gone into cardiac arrest (Sendelbach & Funk, 2013). The patient’s heart monitor battery eventually died and did not issue the critical alarm alert. In another event, a patient fell getting out of bed and bleed to death because the nurse

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

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.

Alarm fatigue is recognized by The Joint Commission as a serious patient safety issue, with alarm mismanagement as being the root cause of alarm fatigue (The Joint Commission, 2013). Numerous regulatory and nursing organizations have published strategies to manage alarm fatigue, however evidence is lacking on the best methodology of educating nurses to alarm management. Put one or two lines of the problem the spurred this project. The aim of this study is to compare the effect of online education methodology versus traditional education methodology on the number of false and non-actionable alarm in a cardiac intensive care unit. Historically, the cardiac intensive care unit continues to have an excess number of false and non-actionable alarms despite previous attempts at raising awareness of alarm fatigue. Chapter three will describe

The abstract clearly outlined every aspect of the article in a concise and acceptable manner. Data was obtained through several interviews with nurses that practiced in the Emergency Room. The abstract concludes with the results of this study.

The broad research problem leading to this study is the belief that nursing shortage in facilities leads to patient safety issues. The review of available literature on this topic shows strong evidence that lower nurse staffing levels in hospitals are associated with worse patient outcomes. Some of these outcomes include very high patient to nurse ratio, fatigue for nurses leading to costly medical mistakes, social environment, nursing staff attrition from the most affected facilities. The study specifically attempts to find a way to understand how nurse

Neonatal health care providers do their best to ensure the environment where the tiniest of patients need to grow emulates the dark, muted place that they were used to. However, these patients are the ones that need high-tech equipment to assist with their care. This equipment comes with many different audible indicators meant to assist the bedside clinician in keeping these patients safe. These sounds contribute to the noise level in the environment meant to heal. Amidst the worry about patient’s exposure to what many times is too loud noise, health care providers, too, are exposed to the constant cacophony of bings, beeps, and bells. The Joint Commission designated a patient safety goal recognizing alarm fatigue as of January 2014, and

Bring forth the conversation on the effects of equipment alarms toward patient's safety is a major concern. As nurses, we think the alarms are a nuisance and tend to be distracting. However, minimum thoughts are address toward the patient's concern.

The preventable barriers identified are classified into consistent themes such as communication, interface between medical staff and fear. Aiken et al. (2002) reported that nurses contribute importantly to surveillance, early detection and timely interventions due to findings that linked association with staffing levels to patient mortality and morbidity. But higher emotional exhaustion and greater job dissatisfaction in nurses credited to the poor management of deterioration, as nurses may develop poor attitudes to intervene. Jones et al. (2006) identified lack of deterioration perception as a cause of not prompting physician review. Additionally, experiencing information overload eroded perception of deterioration as nurses felt concerned about looking stupid. Bogossian et al. (2014) supported this claim as results derived from stimulations foretold participants did not feel empowered escalate protocols as staff feared consequences, was uncertain and become deskilled in management of emergencies.

The problem of nurse shortage is not new to healthcare. Moreover, it becomes burning in critical and intensive care units where the workload is high, and nurses observe an increased risk of burnout (Pastores & Kvetan, 2015). Nurse shortage has a negative impact not only on nurses themselves. It also influences patients and can lead to negative patient outcomes due to less attention that a nurse gives to a patient (Ferrer et al., 2014). Therefore, there is a need for a strategic plan to address nurse shortage and thus contribute both to nurse retention and improved patient outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to present a strategic plan of an intervention aimed at reduction of nurse shortage in intensive and critical care units.

To answer the research question, Will the nursing staff in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) change their attitudes and behaviors regarding alarm management with live classroom education as opposed to online modules, resulting in a reduction in erroneous physiological alarms, the first thought was to measure only the number of alarms that occurred after the online training and then again after the face to face education to maintain simplicity. However, Poli and Tatano Beck (2004) state, “researchers must include one or more measures of all the independent and dependent variable” (p. 325). With that information, both the independent variable and dependent variable will be measured.

Although monitors and alarms are designed with the goal of improving patient monitoring and safety, the overwhelming number of alarms on any given inpatient unit may be doing the exact opposite. The result is that healthcare workers become overwhelmed with efforts to respond to multiple alarms. A report (Mitka, 2013) concluded that many facilities do not address alarm fatigue until something goes wrong. Healthcare workers also experience desensitization, resulting in missed alarms, and delayed response to critical alarms that place patients at

A sentinel alarm event occurred at several hospitals within the AW Network, which prompted the Pennsylvania Department of Health to conduct a Center for Medicare Services level investigation. This type of investigation requires an action plan with a measure of correction. Parallel with the alarm events, the Joint Commission had created the National Patient Safety Goal 06.01.01, also known as goal six, to reduce harm associated with clinical alarms (The Joint Commission, 2014). The potential patient risks for an adverse event from alarm mismanagement are experienced around the world, and while the particulars of each event varies; research suggests that by reducing nuisance alarms, the chance for an adverse event diminishes (Gorges,