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Alarm Fatigue and its Effects on Quality Patient Care Essay
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Hospitalized patients are often hooked up to monitoring devices such as heart monitors, which monitor the electric activity of the heart, or connected to a physiological monitor so their vital signs are constantly being measured. These monitors are intended to continuously assess the patients’ status, and alarm if the patients’ status drops below what is considered normal. The increased use of monitoring devices has created a new phenomenon known as alarm fatigue. According to the ECRI institute (2011), “alarm fatigue occurs when the sheer number of alarms overwhelms staff and they become desensitized to the alarms resulting in delayed alarm response and missed alarms-often resulting in patient harm or even death.” Alarm fatigue has …show more content…
Each of these monitors is designed to alarm nursing staff whenever a drastic change has occurred with a patient’s condition. For example, if a patient’s heart rate drops below sixty beats per minute then an alarm will sound to alert the nurse that the patient has become bradycardic. These alarms are intended to protect the patient from harm and ensure that they receive timely interventions from nursing staff and physicians (AAMI, 2011).
The Causes Leading up to Alarm Fatigue
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,
43 percent of alarm conditions indicated non-critical, and “generally non-actionable,” events; 38 percent of alarm conditions indicated premature ventricular complexes (PVCs), which, since a landmark 1988 Cardiac Arrhythmic Suppression Trial (CAST) study, are no longer treated; and 3.6 percent of alarm…
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