Changing the Sound of Hospital Alarms Could Improve Patient Care, Study Says

• Beep alarms used in hospitals have been “widely criticized” for going off too often, causing what is known as “alarm fatigue”
• A new study says using alarms with a more “musical” sound could help improve patient care
• Study found xylophone sounds “recognizable” and “less annoying” than traditional hospital alarms

Audible alarms intended to alert hospital staff to patient needs have been “widely criticised” for their “perceived nuisance”. But a new study says that by changing the way they sound, they could combat what’s known as “alarm fatigue”.

“Alarm fatigue contributes to missed alarms and medical errors that result in patient death, increased clinical workload and exhaustion, and impede patient recovery,” the report in Advanced intensive carepeer-reviewed journal of critical care nursing, he said.

However, a study published in Science Direct he said that simply changing the warning from standardized beeps to more musical sounds could help.

A patient in a hospital presses the alert button.

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“Current standards broadly recognize deficits in learning ability, detection, and interference,” according to the study, which was conducted in part by Joseph Schlesinger, an anesthesiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Michael Schutz, a music cognition researcher at McMaster University.

The report added: “Our findings reveal that musical sound alarms are comparably recognizable but significantly less annoying than alarm signals common in medical settings. These results provide a promising first step in improving patient care through musically informed alarm design.”

The study noted that part of the problem is not just the sound of the alarm, but the fact that there are simply too many alarms.

“Operational studies estimate that 85-95% of alarms in intensive care units are not clinically relevant. This predominance of non-emergency alarms reflects the “prevention is better than cure” philosophy for alarm signaling. Although frequent alarms help clinicians stay abreast of changes in patients’ health status, they can lead to unintended perceptual problems such as inattentive deafness — where high cognitive load leads medical staff to miss important alarms,” the study said.

The hospital siren sounded.

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One study found that out of 2,184 alarms, more than half (1,394 alarms in total) were “categorized as false alarms.”

However, comparing a “standard alarm color” with a “synthesized xylophone color,” Schlesinger and Schutz found that “musical audible alarms are comparably recognizable but significantly less annoying than alarm signals common in medical settings.”

“These results provide a promising first step in improving patient care through music-informed alarm design,” the study said.

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Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education