Alarms on hospital devices lead to patient deaths

CHICAGO (AP):

Constantly beeping alarms from devices that monitor the vital signs of the critically ill have "desensitised" hospital workers who sometimes ignore the noise, leading to at least two dozen deaths a year on average, a hospital accrediting group said yesterday.

And these cases are probably vastly underreported, said the Joint Commission in an alert to hospitals calling attention to the problem.

The beeping devices include those that measure blood pressure and heart rate among other things. Some beep when there's an emergency, and some beep when they're not working. That can lead to noise fatigue and the delay in treating a patient can endanger lives, the accreditation commission says.

Complicating the situation is the abundance of technology, with no standardisation for what the beeps mean, said Dr Ana McKee, the commission's executive vice-president and chief medical officer.

The commission's estimate of possible deaths related to the problem is considerably lower than the reports it found in a US Food and Drug Administration database (FDA). The FDA lists more than 500 deaths potentially linked with hospital alarms between January 2005 and June 2010. But that includes mandatory reports of malfunctions and in some cases the connection to a death is only tenuous.

The commission's own database reports 80 deaths and 13 severe injuries between January 2009 and June 2012. Hospitals voluntarily report these to the commission, which reviews them and in these cases determined there was a clear connection to the device, said McKee.