Assessment of knowledge of alarm fatigue, practice towards alarms and associated factors among nurses working in adult intensive care units of federal government hospitals in Addis Ababa city, Ethiopia.
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Date
2020-06
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Addis Abeba University
Abstract
Background: Audible clinical alarms have been an essential part of patient monitoring since the 1950s.
Alarm fatigue is the desensitization of a clinician to an alarm stimulus that occurs when caregivers are
exposed to a great number of repeated alarms. Due to a number of clinical alarms from medical
machines within the ICU, there is a high risk of nurses becoming desensitized to the sound of patient
alarms. Moreover, physiologic alarms may be disabled, silenced, or ignored. These practices can
potentially affect the patient care negatively.
Objectives: To assess the nurses' level of knowledge of alarm fatigue, practices towards alarms and
associated factors among nurses working in adult ICUs of federal government hospitals in Addis Ababa
city, Ethiopia, Jan-Jun 2020 G.C.
Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional quantitative study design was conducted to determine the
knowledge of alarm fatigue, practices towards alarms and associated factors among nurses working in
Adult ICUs of federal governmental hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from Jan -Jun 2020 GC. A total
of 162 nurses was recruited by the convienience sampling method. The data were collected by using
semi structured, self-administer questioner. SPSS version 25 for Windows was used for data entry and
analysis, descriptive statistics and bivariate and multivariate logistic regression were used to analyze the
data.
Result: In this study, 42% of participants had poor practice towards alarms and 57.8% have good
practice. The majority of, 107 (66%) respondents had good knowledge on alarm fatigue. The majority of
nurses 140 (86.4%)answered correctly that Non actionable/nuisance alarms disrupt patient care. Nurses
who don’t have in service training on alarm management are 2 times, having a poor practice than those
who took in service training (AOR=1.974, 95% CI (1.296, 4.024)).
Conclusion and Recommendation: Although the improvement of nurses' knowledge and practices
regarding alarm management will directly or indirectly reduce the harms related to poor alarm
management, Nurses have remarkable gaps and alarming skill performance related to alarms. Therefore,
periodic on-job and pre-service training regarding alarm management, guidelines as well as protocols
should be provided to all ICU nurses. There is also a need for further research to include more settings
would be valuable. In addition, there are gaps identified for further research to strengthen findings.
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Keywords
Adult ICU, alarm fatigue, practice towards alarms.