Alarm Fatigue: Hazards and Prevention

A typical 15-bed hospital unit experiences 942 high-priority monitoring alarms each day.¹ That’s almost 63 alarms per bed each day, or 40 alarms that nurses are required to tend to each hour. With such a high volume of alarms sounding off regularly, it can be easy for staff to lose a crisis alarm in the mix of continuous beeping.

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Desensitization, missed alarms, or delayed responses to alarms are common symptoms of alarm fatigue. What’s startling is that approximately 90% of hospital alarms are said to go unanswered by staff.² It can be next to impossible for nurses to respond every 90 seconds to a sounding alarm since almost everything in a patient’s room is hooked up to a monitor. Everything from high-priority cardiac alerts, to restless movement, to interference can signal an alarm at the nurses’ station. Studies have indicated that approximately 95% of alarms are alerting staff to non-actionable events, which translates roughly to only 50 cases of alarms requiring actual nurse intervention each day on a typical 15-bed unit.³

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