Journal of hospital medicine : an official publication of the Society of Hospital Medicine
-
Alarm fatigue (and resultant alarm nonresponse) threatens the safety of hospitalized patients. Historically threats to patient safety, including alarm fatigue, have been evaluated using a Safety I perspective analyzing rare events such as failure to respond to patients' critical alarms. ⋯ Response timing, observations of the environment, and postsimulation debrief interviews were captured. Four primary means of successful alarm responses were mapped to domains of Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety framework to inform alarm system design and improvement.
-
Optimal design of healthcare spaces can enhance patient care. We applied design thinking and human factors principles to optimize communication and signage on high risk patients to improve situation awareness in a new clinical space for the pediatric ICU. ⋯ When evaluating all patients, shared situation awareness for accurate high-risk status improved from 81% pre-transition to 92% post-transition (p = .006). When assessing individual care team roles, accuracy of patient high-risk status improved from 88% to 95% (p = .05) for RNs, 85% to 96% (p = .003) for residents, and 88% to 95% (p = .03) for RTs. There was no change in the rate of CPR events following the transition.