According to Jespen and Sendelbach 2018, alarm fatigue increases the safety risk of patients particularly when clinicians are exposed to excessive numbers of alarms. In most instances, 89% to 99% of the ECG monitor alarms may be false or clinically insignificant. At the same time, responding to the alarms may be slow or missed. Therefore, patient death may easily occur in the event of a serious clinical problem either due to patient fatigue, an assumed or an unheard alarm. Therefore, current clinical strategies aimed at reducing the number of alarms in order to eliminate fatigue by focusing on ECG and oxygen saturation alarms (Jespen & Sendelbach 2018). However, little is known about the effect of reducing the alarms to a few critical situations. Nonetheless, interventions recommended are supported by expert opinions and have shown that they are effective in improving the quality of outcomes for patients and the services provided to them. In this case, the authors strongly recommend that in order to reduce false and insignificant clinical alarms alongside burnout, hospital units should assess the most critical ones and reduce the unnecessary ones. However, depending on the type of unit and the resources available, hospitals should select their most suitable strategy that would address the specific needs of the hospital unit.
Efforts to eliminate unnecessary alarms and possible risks of death at the End Of Lifecare are crucial. It, therefore, becomes critical to weigh the objectives of having alarms against quality improvement in patient outcomes ( Suba, Sandoval, Hu, & Pelter, 2019). Clinical alarms should only act as an alarm when the patient’s condition has changed into a worse condition and not to provide unnecessary comfort. This is because alarm fatigue would significantly minimize the quality and frequency of services offered to patients.
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References
Jepsen, S., & Sendelbach, S. (2018). Managing Alarms in Acute Care Across the Life Span: Electrocardiography one Pulse Oximetry. CRITICAL CARE NURSE , 38 (2), E16-E20.
Suba, S., Sandoval, C. P., Hu, X., & Pelter, M. M. (2019). ECG Monitoring during End of Life Care: Implications on Alarm Fatigue. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction , 3 (1), 18.
