MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Barbara J. Drew, RN, PhD, FAAN, FAHA David Mortara Distinguished Professor in Physiological Nursing Research, Clinical Professor of Medicine, Cardiology University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Physiological Nursing San Francisco

MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Drew: Hospital cardiac monitors are plagued with alarms that create a cacophony of sounds and visual alerts causing “alarm fatigue” which creates an unsafe patient environment because a life-threatening arrhythmia may be missed in this milieu of sensory overload. Our study is the largest prospective study to date on the alarm fatigue problem. We found a staggering total number of alarms (>2,500,000 in one month) in 461 consecutive patients treated in our 77 adult intensive care unit beds. Although many of these alarms were configured to be visual text messages, we still found a high audible alarm burden of 187 audible alarms per bed per day. A noisy alarm environment interrupts patients’ sleep and invokes fear in patients and their families. We analyzed nearly 13,000 arrhythmia alarms and found that 88% of them were false alarms. (more…)