Patient alarms, meant to alert healthcare professionals of a crisis, sometimes go ignored and at times have led to patient deaths, according to a Boston Globe news report.
Various healthcare equipment, such as cardiac monitoring systems, include an alarm function that alert physicians and nursing staff of crises, such as malfunctioning equipment, low equipment battery or dangerous patient conditions. However, with the rising use of equipment monitors, the risk of “alarm fatigue” has led to unfortunate patient outcomes, including patient death.
Alarm fatigue is a result of overexposure to patient alarms, rendering the alarms to essentially become background noise. Oftentimes, healthcare personnel hear so many patient alarms that they eventually become de-sensitized to the alarms. One study at the Johns Hopkins Hospital showed staff were alerted with critical alarms 942 times a day, amounting to one critical alarm every 90 seconds, according to the report. Consequently, nursing staff often miss low- or mid-level alarms.
In one case, which took place at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2010, an elderly patient suffered and died from a heart attack after the crisis alarm on his cardiac monitoring system was turned off. Additionally, hospital staff failed to respond to lower-level alerts warning of the patient’s lowered heart rates, according to the report.
In response to the tragic patient outcomes, various hospitals have implemented change to ensure monitoring is improved. Measures include installing speakers in hospital hallways to augment the volume of monitor alerts and hiring personnel with the sole responsibility of supervising monitors, according to the report.
Read the report about patient alerts.
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