One problem that hospitals and hospital workers often face is that alarms signifying problems with patients go off constantly. Not only that, but they are often false, and the workers can become fatigued to it and perhaps less likely to respond with urgency, or become tired out by it when they do. As a result, problems and warning signs are often ignored or not noticed, and the devices create a noisy atmosphere that is not pleasant for anyone involved. Ignored alarms are confirmed to have caused over 200 deaths from 2005 to 2010, and it is believed by most experts that this number might be much higher in reality. Some nurses have described becoming almost “immune” these alarms thanks to all the noise. To combat this problem, some of the monitors have been moved from larger stations to smaller “pods” where nurses can work with less distraction, and pay more attention to the information that they really need to see and pay more extra attention to.
One device that is helping to combat this is a device that allows a hospital employee or nurse to shock a patient with a wireless controller, so that they do not even need to be in the room to respond to a patient with a stopping heart, without having to rush into the room or call in whole crash unit teams to help. This device has already saved lives and is much more convenient. As a result of this device, the average response time to patient alarms has also gone down from 8 minutes to less than one minute, which just shows how effective these devices are at saving lives and helping employees work more quickly and more efficiently.