Background: Monitoring serves to maintain physiologic variables within normal limits and when a parameter crosses a set threshold, an alarm is triggered. Therefore, this study aimed to determine whether alarm limits are properly adjusted in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) by nursing staff or not.Methods: The data concerning alarm limits corresponding to the three shifts of nursing...

1.1 This guide provides specific requirements to statistically evaluate measurand alarm thresholds, which are called alarm limits, as they are applied to data collected from in-service oil analysis. These alarm limits are typically used for condition monitoring to produce severity indications relating to states of machinery wear, oil quality, and system contamination. Alarm limits distinguish o...

BACKGROUND After the implementation of narrowed oxygen saturation alarms, alarm frequency increased in the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital NICU which could have a negative impact on patient safety. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations issued a Sentinel Event Alert for hospitals in 2013 to improve alarm safety, resulting in a 2014 National Patient Safety Goal requi...

BACKGROUND Reliance on physiological monitors to continuously "watch" patients and to alert the nurse when a serious rhythm problem occurs is standard practice on monitored units. Alarms are intended to alert clinicians to deviations from a predetermined "normal" status. However, alarm fatigue may occur when the sheer number of monitor alarms overwhelms clinicians, possibly leading to alarms be...

PURPOSE To determine whether lowering oxygen saturation alarm limits for infants at risk for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) reduces its incidence and/or severity. METHODS Oximetry alarm limits were lowered to 85% and 93% for all infants with a birth weight 1250 g or less and/or gestational age 28 weeks or less, and maintained until 32 weeks' postmenstrual age or until oxygen saturations wer...

INTRODUCTION Modification of alarm limits is one approach to mitigating alarm fatigue. We aimed to create and validate heart rate (HR) and respiratory rate (RR) percentiles for hospitalized children, and analyze the safety of replacing current vital sign reference ranges with proposed data-driven, age-stratified 5th and 95th percentile values. METHODS In this retrospective cross-sectional stu...