Workplace Environment and Training

Alarm fatigue reduces quality of care and adversely affects the quality of the workplace environment for healthcare staff. Therefore, comprehensive alarm management strategies should become a cornerstone of healthcare administration. Using diffusion of innovation theory, this paper has shown how administrators can develop effective alarm management strategies.

Alarm management strategies may vary depending on the nursing context, but generally there are several components to alarm management including helping nurses recognize patient risk signals, psychological sifting, reducing unnecessary alarms, and improving the audible quality of alarms by working with technology manufacturers. Different types of alarms can and should be handled by dedicated staff. For example, technical alarms that indicate equipment malfunctions could be directly channeled into equipment technician receivers rather than being broadcast throughout the nursing department. Nursing staff also needs to be trained regularly when new equipment is installed, so that the different sounds of alarms can be distinguished from one another. As nurses are already overburdened, training in alarm management can seem to be another cumbersome human resources project. Yet alarm management is emerging as a critical component of improving both patient outcomes and the workplace environment.

Diffusion of innovation theory shows how an alarm management strategy can become most effective. To reach critical mass, alarm management needs to progress through the five states of diffusion of innovation starting with training and concluding with confirmation assessments. Training in alarm management begins with knowledge dissemination. Next, raising awareness and encouraging change through employee socialization will help persuade staff to recognize how to respond effectively to alarm overload. Designing an alarm management strategy may require supervisory staff to reconsider which staff responds to which alarms. Administrators should have cohesive plans for implementing an alarm management strategy, followed by an assessment of the changes.