Basic HTML Version
Healthcare Journal of NEW ORLEANS
I
NOV / DEC 2013
17
n
Additional Resources
The good news is that there is plenty of help out there with webinars, conferences,
workplace reviews, training posters, and more. Check out the following resources:
The Joint Commission
http://www.jointcommission.org/topics/patient_safety.aspx
ECRI Institute
https://www.ecri.org/Forms/Pages/Alarm_Safety_Resource.aspx
Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation
http://www.aami.org/htsi/alarms/index.html
responding. Not only does this affect patient
comfort and satisfaction, for which hospitals
are being held increasingly accountable, but
patients and their families have been known
to take matters into their own hands and
disable the equipment themselves. “The
patient experience side, is not really in the
Joint Commission’s approach, but there is
a patient experience part of this in that you
need a good alarmmanagement plan, where
staff know how to manage alarms, and they
are done to meet patient care needs,” said
Brewer. If a lot of alarms are going off it’s
difficult for patients to rest. It has to be part
of the conversation when you are talking
about why alarms are going off and why we
need alarms.”
Toups agrees that patient education is
a necessary component of any hospital
alarm management plan. “It’s always good
to involve the family in the care of the patient
wherever you can,”said Toups. “I think for us
this would be no different. I think we would
really start to educate familymembers as to
what the different alarms mean, what’s criti-
cal, and which ones may need attention, but
not immediately. I think the big challenge is
going to be to individualize all of that to the
patient and their clinical needs. And tomake
sure that someone can’t go in and silence an
alarm that doesn’t have the authority—and
that would include the family.”Collura indi-
cated that is it is part of North Oaks’ care
planning to involve the patient and the family
in everything that they do for that patient. “If
the patient has a pump for example, they test
out that nurse call alarm. They can hear the
volume and sound of that as it sounds at the
nurse’s station, so that family is integrated
into that patient’s care.”
Manufacturers, too, have done their bit to
help with alarm safety although not neces-
sarily alarm fatigue. There has been a push
towards standardization so that the same
alarm sound always means the same thing.
While we are not there yet, manufacturers
have made progress toward making critical
alarms sound more distinctive and urgent.
Some have also made it impossible or at
least very difficult to disable or mute a criti-
cal alarm. “I thinkmanufacturers aremoving
in that direction,”said Toups. “The challenge
is you have all different levels of equipment
in the hospital, some older and newer. I do
see in some of the newer equipment that’s
coming out that a lot of these things are
addressed differently than they have been
in the past. Healthcare is behind in using a
lot of the technological advances that are out
there that other industries have been using,
but I do see a movement in that direction.”
Johnson agrees that manufacturers could
be doing more. “I am kind of a computer
nerd. With all the technology that we have
at our fingertips I think there are ways that
we could change the different parameters
and there are some things that really don’t
need to have an alarm because someone is
right there all the time.”
Some facilities achieve their own stan-
dardization among alarms by carefully
researching each new piece of equipment
to make sure it fits in with the protocols
and technology already in place. “I think
that unless they (manufacturers) have a
variety of equipment to test when they are
making theirs I am not sure they are very
aware of what other sounds are like,” said
Collura. “That’s why when we input a piece
of equipment into our system I think it’s our
responsibility to let the manufacturer know
it sounds like something else and we want to
change the sound. We have a very proactive
biomed department that works with nursing
to identify those things before we actually
purchase a piece of equipment.”
Obviously, not every alarm carries the