By Healthcare Facilities Today

Beginning in January, The Joint Commission is requiring hospitals to identify the alarms that pose the biggest safety risks by unnecessarily adding noise or being ignored. By 2016, hospitals must decide who has the authority to turn off alarms.

Depending on the hospital unit, each patient’s room can generate several hundred alarms each day. The sheer number of alarms in patient rooms are overwhelming some health care workers, according to an article on the Journal Gazette website. Because of the "alarm fatigue" critical alerts are being ignored or silenced.

According to the article, in a 3 1/2 -year period ending June 2012, 98 serious alarm-related events were reported to The Joint Commission. Eighty resulted in the patient’s death. In 13 other cases, patients lost physical or mental functions.

The ECRI Institute, a Pennsylvania-based patient-safety organization, listed alarm hazards as the No. 1 issue on its annual list of the top 10 health-technology dangers for 2012 and 2013.

“I think the main reason is the large growth in the use of monitors that have alarm-based features and the number of alarms that clinicians are needing to deal with,” said Jim Keller, ECRI’s vice president for health-technology evaluation and safety.

Read the article.