Clinical Alarm Systems: A Case Study

The Dangers of Clinical Alarm Systems

The act of doing good, also known as beneficence, is a major role of the nurse. No matter what a nurse does, he or she must demonstrate beneficence in everything he or she does. However, healthcare agencies are not perfect and there are some topics that the Joint Commission has decided could be improved on. They have formulated a list of goals focused primarily on improving nursing care. This list is called the National Patient Safety Goals. One of these goals focuses on reducing the harm associated with clinical alarm systems. This is an immensely important topic, as there have been reports of major injury and even death due to the misuse of alarm systems. However, by following the guidelines demonstrated by the Joint Commission a healthcare agency is able to greatly reduce the risk of alarm associated accidents. When managing alarms in a clinical setting, it is crucial to practice beneficence in

With the goal of reducing unnecessary electrocardiograph signals on a cardiovascular unit, the average number of signals per day was able to be decreased from 28.5 to only 3.29 (Sendelbach et al., 2015). This was able to be accomplished by combining several different approaches to nuisance alarm reduction. Those implementing the study completely eliminated duplicative alarms, customized alarms, changed EKG electrodes daily, standardized skin preparation, and used EKG leads that could be disposed of (Sendelbach et al., 2015). This study proves that bundling many approaches together to safely reduce unwanted alarms has the capability to completely change the frequency of alarms in a nursing unit. When others units implement the same management policy, it is crucial to make sure each nurse is still doing physical assessments and checking vitals regularly to prevent malfunction of alarms as well as be aware of the condition each patient is