The latest from the Boston Globe series:
The burgeoning use of heart monitors allows hospitals to care for sicker patients on regular floors – typically without hiring as many nurses as they do in intensive care units – and to admit patients faster, easing emergency room congestion. Many physicians routinely put patients on the monitors, knowing they can save lives by catching life-threatening abnormalities. And since monitoring is noninvasive, it seems harmless.
But an expanding group of researchers, many of them nurses, are questioning the proliferation of monitoring, saying it is a prime cause of the dangerous problem of alarm fatigue. The more patients there are on monitors, they say, the more the machines’ warning alarms blare, leading nurses to become desensitized to the beeps and tune them out. This phenomenon has been linked to dozens of patient deaths nationwide, according to an analysis published this year by the Globe.
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