So-called “alarm fatigue,” the phenomenon where nurse are so inundated with various alarms that they tune them out, has allegedly led\u00a0to brain damage and death for some hospital patients. It is a growing, and frightening,\u00a0trend.<\/p>\r\n
The ECRI Institute, a nonprofit health care research group, teamed up with The Boston Globe for an investigation into alarm fatigue. The story, “Patient Alarms Often Unheard, Unheeded,”\u00a0was published in February by The Globe, and it did an analysis based on Food and Drug Administration data. It attributed 200 hospital-patient deaths to problems with alarms that monitor the heart and breathing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n
http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/local\/massachusetts\/articles\/2011\/02\/13\/patient_alarms_often_unheard_unheeded\/<\/a><\/p>\r\n Simply put, the problem is that there are so many alarms that nurses are supposed\u00a0to be\u00a0paying attention to in hospitals that they become desensitized to them, tuning them out.<\/p>\r\n Therefore, patients who have flatlined or are suffering some other fatal malady are left to die, even as their monitors beep and signal the nurses’ station.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n In one case the family of Richard Chamoun is suing.\u00a0He sustained serious brain damage, and died a month later, while he was in the hospital recovering from a quadruple heart bypass.\u00a0He had been taken off a cardiac monitor for a half hour while nurses bathed him, and they did not realize he was in\u00a0ventricular fibrillation, according to the American Association for Justice.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n