Reducing the Risk of Alarm Fatigue Through the Use of Focused Management in Safety Huddles

Completed · Not applicable

Conditions studied: Clinical Alarms

In brief

Context: Alarm fatigue is a threat to hospital patient safety. National surveys reveal that high alarm rates interrupt patient care, reduce trust in alarms, and lead clinicians to disable alarms entirely. Safety huddles offer an appropriate forum for reviewing alarm data and identifying patients whose high alarm rates may necessitate safe tailoring of alarm limits. Objectives: To evaluate the impact of a focused physiologic monitor alarm reduction intervention integrated into safety huddles that involves discussing safe monitor parameter adjustments on the physiologic monitor alarm rates of individual patients with high alarm rates who meet "low acuity" criteria. Study Design: A prospective, quasi-experimental pilot study of the impact of the huddle intervention on the alarm rates of low acuity high alarm rate individual patients discussed in huddles in the PICU. The huddle intervention will consist of a script to facilitate the discussion of the alarm data. Setting/Participants: Participants will include all low acuity patients and their providers in the PICU at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Study Interventions and Measures: The primary outcome is the rate of crisis and warning alarms per patient day for intervention cases as compared with others in the high alarm / low acuity cohort. Safety measures will include unexpected changes in patient acuity or code blue events within one week of monitor change or discharge.

Key facts

Study ID
NCT02319421
Run by
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
People needed
812
Starts
2015-03-01
Expected to finish
2017-01-01
Last updated by the study team
2017-04-19

Who can join

Age: any. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: not accepted.

Where it is running

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

Trial information comes from ClinicalTrials.gov and is refreshed daily. TrialsForMe does not provide medical care and does not run the studies it lists.