Attitudes and Practices Related to Clinical Alarms: A Follow-up Survey.

BACKGROUND: Alarm fatigue is a widely acknowledged patient safety concern in hospitals. In 2013, The Joint Commission issued a National Patient Safety Goal on Alarm Management, making addressing alarm management a priority. To capture changes in attitudes and practices related to alarms, the Healthcare Technology Foundation conducted and reported findings from national online surveys in 2006 and 2011 and completed a third survey in 2016. OBJECTIVES: The goal of the 2016 survey was to identify how hospital practices and clinicians' perceptions of alarms have changed since 2006. METHODS: The online survey was distributed via national health care organizations during a 2-month period. Results of the 2016 survey (N = 1241) were compared with results of the 2006 and 2011 surveys by using χ2 and Kruskal-Wallis analyses. RESULTS: Responses were significantly different for almost all items across the 3 surveys. Respondents in 2016 were more likely to agree that nuisance alarms occur frequently and disrupt patient care and were less likely to agree that clinical staff responds quickly to alarms. Compared with respondents in 2011, those in 2016 were almost twice as likely to report that their hospitals had experienced adverse events related to alarms in the past 2 years. However, in 2016 a much higher proportion of respondents indicated that their hospitals had implemented alarm improvement initiatives. CONCLUSIONS: Although survey findings show disappointing trends in the past 10 years, including worsening perceptions of nuisance alarms and more alarm-related adverse events, the increase in alarm improvement initiatives is encouraging.

Attitudes and practices related to clinical alarms.

BACKGROUND: The number of devices with alarms has multiplied in recent years, causing alarm fatigue in bedside clinicians. Alarm fatigue is now recognized as a critical safety issue. OBJECTIVE: To determine if attitudes and practices related to clinical alarms have changed since 2005. METHODS: The Healthcare Technology Foundation's Clinical Alarms Committee developed an online survey for hospital personnel that addressed attitudes and practices related to clinical alarms. They administered it in 2005-2006 and in 2011 and compared the results. RESULTS: Respondents were asked about their level of agreement with 19 statements about alarms. Many of the statements revealed no significant differences between the 2 survey years, although some differences were apparent. Respondents to the 2011 survey were significantly more likely to agree with statements about alarm sounds differentiating the priority of alarm and the helpfulness of central alarm management. Respondents in 2011 were significantly less likely to feel that nuisance alarms occur frequently and disrupt patient care. Respondents also ranked the importance of 9 different alarm issues. In both years, they ranked frequent false alarms as the most important. In response to a new question in the 2011 survey, 18% of respondents reported patients' experiencing adverse events related to alarms at their institutions. CONCLUSIONS: Since 2005-2006 when the first survey was conducted, not much has changed. False alarms continue to contribute to a noisy hospital environment, and sentinel events related to alarm fatigue persist. Alarm hazards are a significant patient safety issue.