According to the Joint Commission, as of July 1, 2014,

leaders must establish alarm system safety as a hospital

priority. How can we reduce alarm fatigue now?

What is alarm fatigue?
Alarm fatigue occurs when health care
workers become so desensitized to the
sounding of alarms that they fail to respond.


References:
Technical Advisory Committee and the Patient Safety Advisory Group. (2013, December 11). Alarm System Safety. Retrieved from The Joint Commission
website: http://www.jointcommission.org/assets/1/18/R3_Report_Issue_5_12_2_13_Final.pdf
Trossman, S. (2013, November 4). Sounding the alarm: Nurses, organizations work to address alarm fatigue. Retrieved from American Nurses Association
website: http://www.theamericannurse.org/index.php/2013/11/04/sounding-the-alarm/

What contributes to cause alarm fatigue?
Consider all of the devices used in patient care such as vital sign monitors, ventilators, infusion pumps, feeding pumps,
etc. All of these devices are equipped with alarms. Many of these alarms trigger and result as a false alarm, which can be
caused by patient movement, unconnected leads, pump timed out, and others. The amount of false alarms could result in
the masking of the severity of an important alarm notification.
Some studies have found more than 85 percent of alarms are false, meaning that
the patient is not in any danger. Over time this can make nurses less and less
likely to respond urgently to the sound.
-Technical Advisory Committee and the Patient Safety Advisory Group

What can be done to reduce the desensitization of alarms?
Determine whether or not specific alarm signals are needed or whether they are unnecessary to be able to decrease
the amount of alarms that can potentially be triggered
Receive input from different medical staff on the reduction of the sound of alarms
Establish a defined alarm response time to be included in the monitoring protocol
Widen the parameters that cause the alarm to trigger because sometimes the parameters are set too narrow
Decrease the workload of the nurse which can attribute to alarm fatigue
No matter what the alarm may be, nurses should always respond to sounding alarms. If it turns out to
be a false alarm, then reassure the patient and family.