Give an example of an ethical or legal issue that may arise if a patient has a poor outcome or sentinel event
Give an example of an ethical or legal issue that may arise if a patient has a poor outcome or sentinel event
Distractions are everywhere. They may include cellphones, multiple alarms sounding, overhead paging, monitors beeping, and various interruptions that disrupt your clinical practice.
Give an example of an ethical or legal issue that may arise if a patient has a poor outcome or sentinel event because of a distraction such as alarm fatigue. What does evidence reveal about alarm fatigue and distractions in healthcare when it comes to patient safety?
USE: APA Format and one scholarly peer reviewed resource. Book used for class also included.
Hebda, T., Hunter, K., & Czar, P. (2019). Handbook of informatics for nurses & healthcare professionals (6th ed.). Pearson.
Second: Reply to student below adding depth to topic. 1-2 paragraphs
Hello Professor & class,
Patient safety is a very important aspect of healthcare and aims to reduce and prevent harm and errors that occur to patients during healthcare services. The primary purpose of medical device alarms is to save lives by buzzing and beeping alerts to nurses and doctors of blood pressure, low batteries, medical levels, and dropping heart rates issues (Cho, Kim, Lee, & Cho, 2016). However, as technology advances, clinicians are suffering from alarm fatigue in the clinical setting. Alarm fatigue occurs when healthcare providers are desensitized by countless alarms, some of which are clinically irrelevant or false (DFTB, 2017). Due to alarm fatigue, important alarms are accidentally ignored or missed. For example where I currently work most of our patients are on Vent and there’s different sound when the vent is alarming. Due to the fact that we’re used to the sounds and some vent go off so often we think it’s nothing and wait to see if it’ll stop but that’s not always the case. Sometimes the same sound can also be something serious or life threatening such as disconnected from vent or air leak that’s why regardless of alarm fatigue we go check on the patient just to be sure that patient is okay.
Clinicians’ failure to hear and respond to emergency signals could have serious ethical and legal implications, especially where the failure leads to patient injury or death. The clinician on duty could face lawsuits because of negligence. Clinicians have a well-defined and outlined code of ethics to adhere to while providing services. One ethical standard in the nurses’ code of ethics needs clinicians to safeguard, activate and enhance patients’ health, safety, and rights. Unintentional or deliberate ignorance of patient alarms due to alarm fatigue can result in serious injury or harm to the patients, violating respective standards. Such ignorance, which sometimes goes unpunished and unnoticed, is ethically and legally wrong and can result in lawsuits because of negligence (Cho, Kim, Lee, & Cho, 2016).
Medical alarms are meant to save lives by enhancing patient safety and surveillance. However, overexposure to these alarms makes it difficult for clinicians to hear and respond to real medical emergencies leading to an increased medical error rate (Hebda, Hunter, & Czar, 2018). Alarm fatigue increases medical errors that put patients’ safety at risk. Clinicians may fail to hear and respond to the alarm signal because of alarm fatigue, or ignore it at all, delaying service delivery to patients, thus complicating conditions and endangering their lives.
References
Cho, O. M., Kim, H., Lee, Y. W., & Cho, I. (2016). Clinical alarms in intensive care units: Perceived obstacles of alarm management and alarm fatigue in nurses. Healthcare Informatics Research, 22(1), 46. doi:10.4258/hir.2016.22.1.46
DFTB, T. (2017). Alarm fatigue. Don’t Forget The Bubbles. doi:10.31440/dftb.11810
Hebda, T. L., Hunter, K., & Czar, P. (2018). Handbook of informatics for nurses and healthcare professionals.
Requirements: 1-2 paragraphs
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