Alarm Fatigue

3. The purpose of alarms

The purpose of alarms is to “alert clinicians of the hazardous condition[s]” and is intended to make the clinical environment safer [2]. In addition to showing a patient’s condition, alarms are also used by nurses to organize their order of activities depending on the severity of the patient’s condition.

Increasing complexity of the alarms will deteriorate the nurse’s performance and reaction, however. Adjusting an alarm for different conditions and cases should be very accurate and valid. Therefore, It has been found more efficient to report all the medical alarm incidents in order to improve the alarm adjustment.

4. Patient Safety:

Patient safety (PS) is influenced by so many factors, that in order to ensure PS

Definition Alarm Fatigue:

Alarm Fatigue describes the effect of experiencing too many alarms per patient per day, it can also be labelled as alarm desensitisation. Causes for alarm fatigue are high false alarm rates, a lack of standards for alarms (for example that all heart-rate-monitors have the same alarm sound), a “poor positive predictive value” and a high number of alarms from medical devices in hospitals (Cvach refers to it as “a cacophony of sound” echoing through the hospital). It has been documented that the noise levels in hospitals exceed the noise level recommended by the WHO [2].

Certain problems occur with alarms of Medical Devices: Firstly, in the ICU, there are too many alarms. The literature states up to 700 alarms per patient and per day ([2]) or 150-400 alarms per patient per day [5]. Secondly, about 80-99% of all alarms in the ICU have found to be clinically insignificant [2], and only 6% in an adult ICU relevant [20]. This can lead to a so called “Cry Wolf Effect” which reduces the nurse reaction to serious alarms since previously alarms were clinically insignificant (mistrust of alarms). Furthermore, it might result in a manually disabled alarm (or setting dangerous thresholds) (by the operator/nurse), leading to missing critical conditions and warnings. This is a great danger to patient