Alarm Fatigue: A Case Study

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This article points out issues around the topic of alarm fatigue in hospitals, leading to patient safety issues. The Joint Commissions National Patient Safety Goals for hospitals in 2017 labeled goal 6, to reduce harm associated with clinical alarm systems. The article states common issues occurring with alarm systems and some way to combat alarm fatigue in hospitals. The problem with alarm systems has been increasingly growing and changes need to be introduced in the hospital setting to decrease patient related risks. The purpose of this article was to bring awareness of the growing issue and shows examples of recent hospital implementing alarm system changes and their effects on alarm fatigue. This article was broken down into 3 parts, looking …show more content…
They started by making environmental changes such as, replacing trash can lids with quite ones. They found that the noise from trash can lids was spiking patients heart rate and causing alarms to go off because of the sudden spike in heart rate. This small change brought alarm activation down 3%. The hospitals biggest changes were the alarm associated with capillary oxygen saturation. They decreased the alarm from going off at 93% to 90% and allowed physicians to adjust it according to the patient. There main goal was to have alarms going off when they really needed them and to avoid alarms that were unnecessary. They also implement the adjustment of patient specific alarms during the rounding of patients. When health professionals were doing morning rounds, they would spend a minute or two discussing and documenting the alarm settings for that patient. They then could change the settings for a particular patient due to his/her conditions and whether the alarm was necessary. They found this was the most helpful in reducing unnecessary …show more content…
If a nurse has an alarm going off all the time and they don't know which ones are emergency situations, this causes nurses and health care professionals to be running all around checking alarms that most of the time not an emergency. Alarm fatigue is a real thing and causes nurses to be tired, over worked, and even affect the way they care for their patient. As this article mentioned, to give the best possible care to patients, hospitals must start prioritizing alarms and putting in place systems that can quickly alert them of an emergency without causing harm to patients or staff members. In a hospital, workers need to respond fast to emergencies, but they must know first when an actually emergency is occurring. Nurses and all health care workers need to place the patients safety first, and working to meet goal number 6 of the National patient safety Goals, will result in less harm associated with alarm
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