More than one hundred patients have died in the past six years as a result of problematic alarms on ventilators, which are designed to beep warnings to caregivers when something goes wrong with the machine or the patient’s breathing.The Boston Globe reports that the problems seem to be related less to the devices themselves and more to human error. An analysis conducted by the Globe and the ECRI Institute, a nonprofit patient safety organization, found that 119 people died between 2005 and May 2011 in incidents involving ventilator alarms. According to the analysis, an actual malfunction of the ventilator was the cause in only two of those deaths; all others were the result of caregivers’ ignoring the alerts, failing to hear them or setting the alarms incorrectly.
The report is the latest development in alarm fatigue, a problem that occurs when hospital and home-based caregivers become overwhelmed by the number of alarms that blare constantly from medical devices, such as ventilators or cardiac monitors.
“Alarms occur frequently, and many times they’re false, and because of that many times people fail to act as quickly as they should when an alarm goes off,” Maria Cvach, assistant director of nursing and clinical standards at Johns Hopkins Hospital, told ABCNews.com.
To read the full article please visit-http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2011/12/12/ventilator-alarms-linked-to-patient-deaths/
Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare has extensively covered medical alarm fatigue. Please visit our website at www.psqh for more information.
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