NBC Nightly News Explores Alarm Fatigue
Continuing a string of recent stories on alarm fatigue in US hospitals that started with the Boston Globe and jumped to NPR, NBC Nightly News has picked up the story.
The segment covered some of the key contributing points to alarm fatigue, including the sheer number of patient monitoring devices in the modern hospital environment and the overwhelming number of false alarms that create a “boy who cried wolf” syndrome with nurses.
Robert Bazell of NBC news interviewed Louis Valerio, Executive Director of Cardiac Services, at Maimonides Medical Center of Brooklyn NY.
Bazell asked Valerio, “Isn’t it very easy for a human being to ignore one of these many beeps going on?”
“Absolutely I’m sure you’ve heard the term alarm fatigue or nurses being desensitized because there is so much noise and you just become immune to it.” Valerio responded.
Maimonides Medical Center has implemented several solutions to prevent the problems associated with alarm fatigue including constant staff retraining, and testing the team with intentional false alarms. They have also moved telemetry from the central nursing station to smaller “pod stations” where the nurses have fewer distractions.
The hospital has successfully decreased their average alarm response time from 8 minutes to less than 1 minute.
