Essay On Alarm Fatigue

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Alarm Fatigue a Sentinel Event
It’s hard to leave a loved one in a hospital bed when night falls. Family members leave with a sense of responsibility, guilt, and sadness. They leave relying on the nurse to watch and care for their sick family member. Therefore, it is heart breaking to find out the next morning your loved one has suffered great brain damage due to nurses failing to check on alarm sounds. Now, the family is put on the spot to continue life support or disconnect their family member. One can only imagine what went wrong; up to the minute that you left the hospital, your loved one was doing fine. You are relying on the health care providers to take care of your loved one, just as you would, while you are gone. Staff made an error by ignoring the alarms sounds, warning them that the patient was deteriorating, and costing the patient’s family a great deal of pain. Jenifer Garcia’s life shattered when this exact event happened to her husband in July, 2010 (Kowalczyk, 2011). She left her husband Friday night, alive, and returned the next morning to find out he was brain dead. Advancements in technology are used to decrease and catch medical errors made by health care providers that can harm or kill patients, but alarm fatigue has proven that even technology cannot fully protect a patient from nursing errors, thus taking the lives of patients.
Sentinel Event
A sentinel event is an unforeseen incident that results in death, physical harm, or psychological injury of a patient not related to the patient’s illness (The Joint Comission, 2011). Sentinel events include, but are not limited to, surgery on the wrong patient or body part, rape, suicide, instruments left inside patient, and/or medications errors. All sentinel even...

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...decrease as time goes on, because the money used for the study, new monitors will not be included any more. In the end, the budget will be paid off in time due to decreased sentinel events and change in time shifts.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, it is too late for the Garcia family. Their tragedy should not be in vain and the healthcare industry should learn from the aforementioned mistakes. Patients put themselves in our hands for care; they should not die from alarm fatigue. By conducting an RCA and finding solutions that are supported by evidence based practice, patient safety can be accomplished and alarm fatigue can decrease. There is no reason why a sentinel event should happen, due to alarm fatigue, as it is something that can be prevented. As health care clinicians, it is our job to keep the patients safe and keep the hospital’s reputation from degrading.

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