Improving alarm response in ICU/CCU

Clinical alarm plays a critical role to alert clinician to situations that require urgent response. However, alarms are often ignored or switched off. The objectives of the study are to identify how clinicians responded to user response, propose response time and recommend improvements to the clinical alarm performance. A focus group was commissioned to identify the high and medium risk based alarm conditions and propose appropriate response time. A survey was carried out in Malaysia with 324 clinicians, 279(86.1%) were registered nurses and medical assistants (MA) and 45(13.9%) were medical doctors. The findings show that 16.0% of the respondents switched off the alarm, 20.4% silenced the alarm, 14.5% delayed to respond and 20% ignored the alarm. The findings indicate 78.1% of the respondent recommended less than 10sec for ‘immediate respond’ for high risk alarm, 72.5% recommended less than 60sec for ‘prompt respond’ for medium risk alarms but49% recommended that delayed respond for low risk alarm should not be specified. This will then reduce the number of alarms and workload in ICU/CCU. The key recommendation that has been proposed to improve clinical alarm performance is to ensure the alarm signal to indicate urgency to respond. The incorporation of the response time based on risk in the design of alarm, to indicate urgency to respond in auditory alarm signal can improve user response and patient safety. © 2015, UK Simulation Society. All rights reserved.