Alarm fatigue survey

Specialties Cardiac

Published

I am working on the final project of my RN-BSN bridge program. If you are a hospital nurse who regularly has patients on cardiac telemetry and pulse-oximetry monitors, would you be willing to do me a huge favor by completing a short anonymous 10-question survey? Thank you so much! Feedback on this thread is also welcome. I am working with my hospital to develop clinical alarm management practices that will reduce the risks of alarm fatigue. I'll post survey results on this thread in case you're interested.

Here is the survey link:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CBFXPHK

A definition of alarm fatigue from Ulrich (2013):

Alarm fatigue occurs when nurses or other caregivers, overloaded by being exposed to an excessive number of alarms, become desensitized or immune to the alarms. As a result, the response to alarms can be delayed, alarm limits may be adjusted outside the limits that are safe, and the alarms may be muted or turned off altogether - all of which can create an unsafe situation for the patient.

Ulrich, B. (2013). Alarm fatigue: A growing problem. Nephrology Nursing Journal, 40(4): 293, 346.

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Specializes in Emergency/Trauma/Critical Care Nursing.

Consider it done. I'm a huge proponent of preventing alarm fatigue, good subject!!

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Specializes in Med-Surge, Tele, PCU, CVICU, NSICU.

Done!

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Specializes in Emergency.

Done.

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Done.

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Specializes in Anesthesia, ICU, PCU.

Excellent topic, consider it done!

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Specializes in Oncology.

Good survey! I'd say alarm fatigue is a huge problem on my unit. I try to adjust my alarm limits so that they're not always going off, but I find a lot of nurses don't, and some don't even know how. When I've offered to help adjust alarm limits to limit alarms, I'm often met with resistance. On the flip side, I once had a nurse turn off alarms on my patient without asking my permission.

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Specializes in Emergency Nursing.

Done! You may want to add to your data the department of the nurses who took this survey; some of your questions I answered "daily" because I get new patients every day being in the ED. Someone who has the same patient for 12 hours straight would answer that question differently.

I think a large problem is family pressing silent on the monitors--then I may have no idea that a patient is alarming unless I am physically looking at their monitor. Usually if I hear someone else's room alarming, I will walk in and adjust/retake a BP/etc, and then tell the nurse. IE: "Room 24's BP was 88/56 but when I took it again it was 94/72", " I adjusted the ST alarms in Room 30 for you", etc.

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Done.

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Specializes in Orthopedics, Pediatrics.

Done! Good luck!

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Thanks everyone!! I'm getting lots of great feedback. I'll be sure to share the results when I'm done :)

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Specializes in cardiac-telemetry, hospice, ICU.

Great idea and topic, glad to participate

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