Interdisciplinary Consideration -- Alarm Fatigue
Interdisciplinary Consideration: Alarm Fatigue
Alarm fatigue is a very real problem for a number of people in various disciplines. It occurs when alarms go off so much that people begin to tune them out. That could mean ignoring something that would be very important to note, and could end up putting patients at risk of serious injury and even death. Two of the disciplines where alarm fatigue is a serious problem include nursing and surgery. In both areas there are many alarms going off, alerting medical personnel of various conditions. However, "alarms" may not really be the right word for these sounds. A number of the noises that occur are more closely based on notifying people of something, as opposed to an actual alarm that is set to indicate a true emergency. Clearly, changes need to be made that can help both nurses and surgeons know when they are being notified of something and when there is a true emergency to which they must immediately attend. Without a better understanding of the reasons behind alarm fatigue, it is very difficult to suggest options to help combat it.
Combating alarm fatigue is extremely important, and has to be addressed sooner as opposed to later. Without doing that, the medical personnel on whom patients rely will be putting those same patients at risk, and not helping them to heal and improve so they can leave the hospital. Terminal patients who need pain medication and other types of related care may also go too long without getting what they really need,...
In some cases, patients have died because nurses have ignored alarms for too long and have not checked on the patients properly or in a timely manner. In the surgical suite, the surgeons have others to help advise them regarding alarms, but that does not mean the entire surgical team cannot get caught up in alarm fatigue.
However, planned changes that will impact the disciplines mentioned previously -- especially nursing -- involve the way the alarms actually sound. Studies have shown that the noises are tuned out because they can seem "unfriendly" and because they are all alike in many ways. The tones, volume levels, and durations of the alarms are all too close together to be valuable when it comes to properly distinguishing them from one another. That is a large part of why they are tuned out by nurses, surgeons, and other medical personnel. It is not that these people do not see the importance of the alarms, but only that they lose focus on them because the alarms all blend together into a cacophony of noise that has to be tuned out in order to function in the fast-paced medical environment. Since the sounds of the alarms now have to be tuned out, it stands to reason that the sounds must be changed. By providing nurses and surgeons with alarm sounds that are different from one another and from what is currently used, the odds of combating alarm fatigue increase.
Changing the alarms over will take some time, and will also cost money. Machines that sound different…
