Alarm Fatigue- peds specific

Nurses General Nursing

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Specializes in NICU, ICU, PICU, Academia.

I'm working on an Alarm Fatigue group at my large hospital. I am the only rep from the peds side of things- and so much of the adult evidence is not applicable, given our unique patient diversity.

I've tried a lit search, but am coming up empty for the most part. Any of you working on this from a peds point of view? What have you found? Can you point me to ANY specific resources I can use for this?

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Specializes in Critical Care, ED, Cath lab, CTPAC,Trauma.

Wow peds specific....I'll look for you and check with some friends at the big children's centers I'll also check with a couple of pedi members here.

Lots of alarms in Peds I would think it is worse....I'll look

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Specializes in NICU, ICU, PICU, Academia.

The difficult things for us is this: A newborn's alarm low limit is generally 120. A 17 year old hulking football player, 40.

A newborn hypoplastic left heart low sat limit is 65, hulking football player, 92.

EVERYTHING must be customized, and the variation is enormous.

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, PACU.

Our sat limits are set 88-93% for our low birth weight preemies to save their eyes from harm. Those alarms make us crazy... Wean oxygen 1% sat too low, increase by 1%, sat too high. All day we hear this... And we do get start to get immune to the sound after 8 hours. Six monitors constantly alarming is enough to make you scream.

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Specializes in ICU.

This isn't peds-specific, but allowing the nurses to customize the monitor alarms limits alarm fatigue, period. I had a lot less problems with alarms when I worked somewhere that alarms were nursing-regulated. Now that we have to have a physician's order in the chart to adjust alarm parameters, it's different. So, for the love of all that's holy, don't implement only changing parameters based on physician orders. It's a nightmare.

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