A Need for Change 

Even the most committed clinicians cannot address alarm fatigue on their own. If hospital leaders do not prioritize alarm system safety and the reduction of non-critical alarms, both clinicians and patients will suffer.

A few sobering facts(2): 

• In a busy critical care unit, medical personnel can be exposed to up to 5,000 alarms in a single shift 
• A hospital reported an average of one million alarms going off in a single week in a medium-sized health care facility 
• A children’s hospital reported 5,300 alarms in a day – 95% of them false. 
• A hospital reported at least 350 alarms per patient per day in the intensive care unit in a medium-sized health care facility.

The Joint Commission stresses in its 2019 National Patient Safety Goals that alarm standards should be customizable for specific clinical units, groups of patients, or individual patients to combat alarm fatigue. To implement meaningful, department-wide improvements in alarm customization, hospitals need the right data and tools. 

Success through Change

A hospital in Texas recently implemented Spacelabs SafeNSound™ technology and began utilizing the software’s alarm management tools to review alarm data reports and make meaningful changes that would not negatively affect patient care. SafeNSound offers a variety of alarm reports to help clinicians make the best decisions possible when managing their patients. 

After reviewing alarm detail, a decision was made to adjust the R on T PVC alarm parameters. By changing the settings, this facility was able to reduce this one alarm by 30,000 alarms in one month. You can see this in the alarm limits report and graph below where the alarm settings were adjusted on 1/16 and the reduction in R on T PVC alarms that resulted. This was a significant reduction in nuisance alarms per device – 40%. The hospital is now continuing its review of what alarms can be safely adjusted to positively impact staff and patients. 

Conclusion