Alarm fatigue can be life-threatening

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - Alarms save lives in hospitals every day. But health officials tell us too many of them can overwhelm caregivers, creating a potentially deadly scenario.

It's called " alarm fatigue ," a situation where doctors and nurses become so overwhelmed with beeps and warnings from medical machines that the alarms go unnoticed, or even ignored.

You don't have to be a doctor to know a hospital can be a noisy place. But when the constant beeps of alerts turn into white noise for the medical staff, lives hang in the balance. That was the case at UMass Memorial in Worcester, where reports show two patients have died in the past fours years because of alarms that were not responded to.

We checked, and are told there have been no deaths linked to alarm fatigue here in Rhode Island. Local health experts are working hard to keep it that way.

"We undertook an extensive education program with our critical care nurses to make certain they understood how to adjust the alarms, and to be able to tailor them to patients' needs," says Doctor Michael Dacey, the Chief Medical Officer at Kent Hospital in Warwick.

Kent Hospital has zero reported cases of alarm fatigue. Dr. Dacey says that clean record is the product of an ongoing effort by the entire staff to cut back on un-needed monitoring.

"The more people you put on monitors the more false alarms you’re going to have," says Dr. Dacey, "It's estimated that 90 percent of alarms that go off in intensive care units and in emergency departments are not significant at all."

The nursing staff at Kent is trained to cut back on those false alarms by customizing the alarm settings for each patient. Donna Horrocks, a registered nurse and the Nursing Educator at Kent Hospital, says "The alarms, when we set the specific for the patient, they do provide better care."

Alarms at Kent are monitored in each room and at a central nursing station. They're also broken up into three different levels; low, medium, and high. "Anything that’s life-threatening on the monitor would be a high level alarm," says Horrocks. "It's a continuous alarm."

So what can you do to protect yourself or a family member who's a patient? Doctors say it's important to ask questions ahead of time, so you know what to expect.

"It's a matter of talking to your doctor and making sure you understand what kind of monitoring will be used for your surgery or medical stay," says Dr. Dacey.

Both the FDA and the Joint Commission that accredits hospitals nationwide say that preventing alarm fatigue is now one of their highest priorities. Both groups are working on strategies to address the problem across the country.