NPR Addresses Alarm Fatigue
Awareness of alarm fatigue continues to spread throughout the nation. On February 15, 2011, Michele Norris from National Public Radio’s program “All Things Considered” interviewed Liz Kowalczyk, a reporter on healthcare for the Boston Globe who has written a series of articles exploring the risks posed by alarm fatigue. Listed below are some highlights from the conversation.
LIZ KOWALCZYK: One of the cases that I wrote about involved an elderly woman at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. She was in the hospital to get a cardiac catheterization. Her monitor sounded an alarm for about an hour, indicating a weak battery. And then for about 15 minutes, indicating a battery that was about to die. And no one responded to that alarm and she did have a heart attack. And because the alarm – the monitor wasn’t working, there was no alarm to alert staff to her heart attack.
MICHELE NORRIS: Do the devices themselves have problems or flaws that contribute to alarm fatigue?
Ms. KOWALCZYK: Well, I think you would hear a lot of nurses and doctors saying that they do. The big problem for nurses is that most – the vast majority of these alarms are false alarms. The machines are so sensitive, that they alarm when a patient coughs, they alarm when a patient turns over. And that contributes to alarm fatigue.
Ms. NORRIS: So, what can be done about this? How are hospitals responding?
Ms. KOWALCZYK: Well, I think there are some short-term solutions. Hospitals are trying, you know, one is to hire nurses or technicians whose sole job is just to monitor the monitors. Another solution hospitals are looking at is trying to reduce the number of people on monitors. There are a lot of patients on cardiac monitors who probably don’t need to be on cardiac monitors.
But, you know, there has to be systemic longer term solutions that are reached in cooperation with companies in terms of how these monitors work and trying to reduce the number of false alarms that they produce.
Liz Kowalczyk has written several articles on the topic of alarm fatigue. You can read each of them by following the links below.
Patient alarms often unheard, unheeded
