Raising the alarm: patient care at risk from too many... bells, beeps & buzzers independent study.

Ask a group of nurses if they’ve ever heard of alarm fatigue and you’ll receive a few puzzled looks. Ask the same group of nurses if they’ve ever heard IV pump beeps and bed alarms in their sleep and everyone starts nodding their head. “We've all had the alarms invade our sleep!,” said Nicole Jaskot, RN, a SE Michigan float nurse. “What nurse hasn't vividly dreamt about work all night only to wake up feeling cheated of sleep while feeling like they just worked another 12-hour shift?” Every day, nurses and health care professionals are exposed to hundreds of alarms in their units. Tens of thousands of alarms are going off all day and night throughout the hospital. The intense, discordant mixture of noise provokes nurses to tune out the warnings by disabling the alarm, finding a way to silence the alarm, or just ignoring the noise altogether. Nurses, health care professionals, patients and family members are bombarded by the barrage of ringing, beeping, and buzzing. Safe patient care is compromised by the distracting sound of the very alarms that are designed to help monitor the patient. How can nurses address these concerns? What strategies can be utilized to combat this critical phenomenon of sensory overload? Raising the alaRm: Patient Care at Risk from Too Many... Bells, Beeps & Buzzers