Hospital equipment.Photo:Getty
Getty
The beeping alarms that are intended to alert hospital staff to apatient’s needshave been “widely criticized” for their “perceived annoyance.” But a new study says that changing the way they sound could combat what’s known as “alarm fatigue.”
“Alarm fatigue contributes to missed alarms and medical errors that result in patient death, increased clinical workload and burnout, and interference with patient recovery,” a report inAdvanced Critical Care, a peer-reviewed journal for critical care nurses, said.
However, a study published inScience Directsaid simply changing the alerts from the standardized beeps to more musical sounds could help.
A hospital patient presses an alert button.Getty
The reported added, “Our findings reveal musical sounding alarms are comparably recognizable, yet significantly less annoying than alarm signals common in medical environments. These outcomes provide a promising first step to improving patient care through musically informed alarm design.”
The study noted that part of the problem isn’t just the sound of the alarms, but the fact that there are simply too many alarms.
“Observational studies estimate 85–95% of alarms in critical care units are not clinically relevant. This preponderance of non-urgent alarms reflects a ‘better safe than sorry’ philosophy to alarm signaling. Although frequent alarms help clinicians stay apprised of changes in patients’ health, they can introduce unintended perceptual problems such as inattentional deafness — wherehigh cognitive loadleads medical personnel to miss important alarms,” the study said.
A hospital siren goes off.Getty
One studyfound that out of 2,184 alarms, more than half (a total of 1,394 alarms) “were categorized as false alarms.”
“These outcomes provide a promising first step to improving patient care through musically informed alarm design,” the study said.
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source: people.com
