Monitoring practice and alarm technology in anaesthesiology

In this article we examine how one of the most pervasive technological implementations in the healthcare domain--the alarm system--is used in anaesthesiology as part of patient monitoring. The utility and appropriateness of alarms in healthcare domains have been widely addressed in the literature. However, we argue that we still know little about the practical use of alarm systems in actual healthcare practice. Studies rarely examine in detail the everyday monitoring practices during normal operations in the absence of, or before, problems become critical and alarming. They have mainly considered how medical professionals manage the interpretation of and response to alarms. Rather than examining how the anaesthesiologist identifies and responds to alarms and critical problems, in this article we focus on how the anaesthesiologist is actively and prospectively engaged in implementing a situated and emergent organization of patient monitoring, using a wide range of different technological and material resources.