[Improvements in alarm care speed for the clinical monitor system]

Hypoxia often occurs in the course of emergency treatment the monitoring systems alarm is not heard promptly by the nurses in attendance. In this study, nurses were monitored for the speed of their reactions to such alarms in 326 clinical instances. In 128 instances (39 percent) the nurses reacted immediately (within ten seconds), and in 198 instances (61 percent) the nurses took more than ten seconds to react. In relation to the reactions that took longer than ten seconds, it was discovered that there was: a lack of alertness about dealing with alarms, insufficient knowledge about setting alarms, no coordinated response mechanism, a failure to hear the alarm, limitations affecting the equipment and difficulty detecting the direction of origin of the alarm sound. For these reasons the hospital implemented briefings about alarms during morning meetings, a coordinated response mechanism, improvements in standards concerning the setting and inspection of alarms, the setting of limits on the frequency of patient's visits and the numbers of visitors, and the setting of a standard alarm volume level. As a result, the percentage of nurses responding to alarms within ten seconds increased to eighty percent, raising standards of nursing care, medical treatment and patient safety.