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Clinical Alarms in a Gynaecological Surgical Unit: A Retrospective Data Analysis

Alarm fatigue refers to the desensitisation of medical staff to patient monitor clinical alarms, which may lead to slower response time or total ignorance of alarms and thereby affects patient safety. The reasons behind alarm fatigue are complex; the main contributing factors include the high number...

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Autores principales: Jämsä, Juho O., Uutela, Kimmo H., Tapper, Anna-Maija, Lehtonen, Lasse
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10001798/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36901201
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20054193
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author Jämsä, Juho O.
Uutela, Kimmo H.
Tapper, Anna-Maija
Lehtonen, Lasse
author_facet Jämsä, Juho O.
Uutela, Kimmo H.
Tapper, Anna-Maija
Lehtonen, Lasse
author_sort Jämsä, Juho O.
collection PubMed
description Alarm fatigue refers to the desensitisation of medical staff to patient monitor clinical alarms, which may lead to slower response time or total ignorance of alarms and thereby affects patient safety. The reasons behind alarm fatigue are complex; the main contributing factors include the high number of alarms and the poor positive predictive value of alarms. The study was performed in the Surgery and Anaesthesia Unit of the Women’s Hospital, Helsinki, by collecting data from patient monitoring device clinical alarms and patient characteristics from surgical operations. We descriptively analysed the data and statistically analysed the differences in alarm types between weekdays and weekends, using chi-squared, for a total of eight monitors with 562 patients. The most common operational procedure was caesarean section, of which 149 were performed (15.7%). Statistically significant differences existed in alarm types and procedures between weekdays and weekends. The number of alarms produced was 11.7 per patient. In total, 4698 (71.5%) alarms were technical and 1873 (28.5%) were physiological. The most common physiological alarm type was low pulse oximetry, with a total of 437 (23.3%). Of all the alarms, the number of alarms either acknowledged or silenced was 1234 (18.8%). A notable phenomenon in the study unit was alarm fatigue. Greater customisation of patient monitors for different settings is needed to reduce the number of alarms that do not have clinical significance.
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spelling pubmed-100017982023-03-11 Clinical Alarms in a Gynaecological Surgical Unit: A Retrospective Data Analysis Jämsä, Juho O. Uutela, Kimmo H. Tapper, Anna-Maija Lehtonen, Lasse Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Alarm fatigue refers to the desensitisation of medical staff to patient monitor clinical alarms, which may lead to slower response time or total ignorance of alarms and thereby affects patient safety. The reasons behind alarm fatigue are complex; the main contributing factors include the high number of alarms and the poor positive predictive value of alarms. The study was performed in the Surgery and Anaesthesia Unit of the Women’s Hospital, Helsinki, by collecting data from patient monitoring device clinical alarms and patient characteristics from surgical operations. We descriptively analysed the data and statistically analysed the differences in alarm types between weekdays and weekends, using chi-squared, for a total of eight monitors with 562 patients. The most common operational procedure was caesarean section, of which 149 were performed (15.7%). Statistically significant differences existed in alarm types and procedures between weekdays and weekends. The number of alarms produced was 11.7 per patient. In total, 4698 (71.5%) alarms were technical and 1873 (28.5%) were physiological. The most common physiological alarm type was low pulse oximetry, with a total of 437 (23.3%). Of all the alarms, the number of alarms either acknowledged or silenced was 1234 (18.8%). A notable phenomenon in the study unit was alarm fatigue. Greater customisation of patient monitors for different settings is needed to reduce the number of alarms that do not have clinical significance. MDPI 2023-02-26 /pmc/articles/PMC10001798/ /pubmed/36901201 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20054193 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Jämsä, Juho O.
Uutela, Kimmo H.
Tapper, Anna-Maija
Lehtonen, Lasse
Clinical Alarms in a Gynaecological Surgical Unit: A Retrospective Data Analysis
title Clinical Alarms in a Gynaecological Surgical Unit: A Retrospective Data Analysis
title_full Clinical Alarms in a Gynaecological Surgical Unit: A Retrospective Data Analysis
title_fullStr Clinical Alarms in a Gynaecological Surgical Unit: A Retrospective Data Analysis
title_full_unstemmed Clinical Alarms in a Gynaecological Surgical Unit: A Retrospective Data Analysis
title_short Clinical Alarms in a Gynaecological Surgical Unit: A Retrospective Data Analysis
title_sort clinical alarms in a gynaecological surgical unit: a retrospective data analysis
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10001798/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36901201
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20054193
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