Chirps and Beeps

Today there's no hospital area - day or night - that isn't noisy. Add to this spectrum of decibels all the increasing number of machines, like infusion pump alerts, monitors that sound when patients try to leave their beds, blood pressure and heart rate alarms. Add all the pagers and hospital telephones. Ultimately the (health care worker) attention deficit-(alarm and noise) hyperactivity disorder prevails.

As a new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association states, a tenet of medical alarm is that "the alarm activates only when a serious problem develops." As the level and complexity of patient care increase, unfortunately, more and more alerts have been invented. And no wonder: many of us believe hospital alarms should improve patient safety. This is true for critical alarms. On the other hand, many of the current alerts - visual or audible - probably don't bother a doctor or nurse that much, and are often disabled (such as a pop-up message about a patient's history of hepatitis) or muted (as is the case with a patient who triggers an alarm after minor movement in bed).

Simply put, we are caught up in a chaotic maze of cues, signals and noise. Whether we realize it or not, most of the modern hospital alerts are hyperactive enough to cause attention deficit or alarm fatigue. And the last thing we want to see is a man found dead in his hospital bed with a cardiac monitor that has been set to mute.