In: Biology
Reflect on your practice and identify a significant nursing clinical issue that you would like to search for evidence in online sources. This issue will be the basis for the Research Database Assignment that you will submit in Week 3. Formulate searchable, clinical questions in the PICO(T) format for your nursing clinical issue. Remember to integrate references.
The area that was chosen for this assignment is alarm fatigue. Alarm fatigue has been described as the process that occurs when nurses are desensitized due to too many alarms that are sounding constantly. Often times, there is no clinical indication for alarms that are sounding. This leads nurses to make the assumption that certain alarms are not important or the alarms very simply become background noise. Alarm fatigue has become nationally recognized and is the National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) that was implemented by JCAHO for 2014. Medical alarms that are supposed to make nurses aware that something is wrong with the patient and prevent sentinel events have resulted in sentinel events. Some research has been done to show that alarms that were ignored is what led to the sentinel event occurring. I chose to research this area as I have witnessed this in the workplace over the years. I am reluctant to see what the outcomes of research on this subject will lead to and what protocol implementations will occur to meet the 2016 JCAHO deadline for this problem to be addressed.