It's a problem that can no longer be overlooked by hospitals. Alarm fatigues can put a patient's life in danger, even causing his or her death, and greatly reduce the quality of life of health care workers. But for it to be dealt with correctly, the causes should be identified first, and a team from the University of California San Francisco (USCF) did just that.
Intensive care patients are hooked up to different machines, which may trigger an alarm sound in the computer systems that may be found in the nurse's station. This setup allows the health workers to carefully monitor the patient while being able to assist others who need their help as well.
If something goes wrong, perhaps a change in the patient's breathing, the machine sounds off, allowing the health workers to immediately check and attend to the patient.
However, in a hospital setting, these scenarios happen all too often. In fact, based on the study conducted by the UCSF team led by Dr. Barbara Drew, PhD, their subject hospital experienced more than 2 million of these alarms in a month.
Too many alarms can cause a desensitization effect, wherein the health workers become immune to the sound they can no longer respond in the speed they're supposed to or they intentionally shut the alarm off or lower the volume. Some have also experienced an abnormal level of distress or anxiety. All these can lead to death of the patient.
The lack of necessary, sufficient, and accurate data compelled the researchers to conduct one of the biggest observational studies about the subject.
They gathered data that's worth 31 days from monitors attached to over 450 patients in the intensive care unit of the UCSF Medical Center. They discovered that within such period, the machines created over 2.5 million unique alarms, of which 1.1 million can be attributed to arrhythmia alarms. However, more than 85% of these alarms are actually false positives caused by errors in the algorithm of the machine.
Thus, they suggest that one of the first key steps hospitals should take to reduce alarm fatigue is to check the calibration or settings of the machine to avoid false-positive alarms and to improve the device continuously.
