Even so, Warner was tough — she had raised 11 children and worked in a factory for 25 years. “Every time something would happen, we would say, ‘Is she going to pull out of this one?’ ’’ said her son Howard. “And she always did.’’
This time, she did not. Warner died after nurses failed to respond to an alarm that sounded for about 75 minutes, signaling that her heart monitor’s battery needed to be replaced, state investigators found.
It’s an all-too-common problem in hospitals — alarm fatigue — but War ner’s death led UMass Memorial to do something about it. The hospital linked alarms to nurses’ pagers and cellphones, and now it plans to reduce the number of alarms by connecting fewer patients to monitors, in hopes that nurses will not have their alertness numbed by as many false alarms.
Hospitals, monitor manufacturers, researchers, and federal regulators are similarly grappling with how to reduce the rash of unheard and ignored alarms and other patient monitor problems — which the Globe reported yesterday was linked to more than 200 deaths nationwide between 2005 and mid-2010, and, experts say, probably far, far more. But they are finding answers elusive.
“If there were an obvious solution to this problem, we would have done’’ it, said Dr. James Bagian, the former chief patient safety officer for the Veterans Administration hospitals, where he said there have been multiple patient deaths and close calls because alarms were turned off or the volume was turned down. “No one has one.’’
Solutions being explored range from relatively simple fixes to sophisticated technology. Some — like UMass Memorial’s effort to reduce the number of monitored patients — are being tried out in hospitals where patients have died, while others are being tested in labs or debated by regulators. Most are expensive, however, and may not be practical, patient safety experts say, at a time when hospitals are under enormous pressure to cut costs. They include:
