TY - JOUR T1 - Sounds good: the bright future of clinical alarm management initiatives JF - BMJ Quality & Safety JO - BMJ Qual Saf SP - 701 LP - 703 DO - 10.1136/bmjqs-2019-010561 VL - 29 IS - 9 AU - Halley Ruppel AU - Christopher P Bonafide Y1 - 2020/09/01 UR - http://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/29/9/701.abstract N2 - For decades, those working in hospitals normalised the incessant alarms from medical devices as a necessary, almost comforting, reality of a high tech industry. While nurses drowned in excessive, frequently uninformative alarms, other members of the healthcare team often paid little attention. Fortunately, times are changing and managing alarm fatigue is now a key patient safety priority in acute care environments.1 Adverse patient events from alarm fatigue, particularly related to excessive physiological monitor alarms, have received widespread attention over the last decade, including from the news media.2–5 In the USA, hospitals redoubled alarm safety efforts following the 2013 Joint Commission Sentinel Event Alert and subsequent National Patient Safety Goals on alarm safety.1 2 6 We are now beginning to understand how to reduce excessive non-actionable alarms (including invalid alarms as well as those that are valid but not actionable or informative),7 8 better manage alarm notifications and ultimately improve patient safety. Alarm data are readily available and measuring alarm response time during patient care is possible.7 9 Yet we have few high-quality reports describing clear improvement to clinical alarm burden, and most published interventions are of limited scope, duration or both.10 11 To demonstrate value in alarm quality improvement (QI) efforts moving forward, we need more rigorous evidence for interventions and more meaningful outcome measures.In this issue of BMJ Quality and Safety, Pater et al 12 report the results of a comprehensive multidisciplinary alarm management QI project executed over 3½ years in a 17-bed paediatric acute care cardiology unit. The primary project goal was to reduce alarm notifications from continuous bedside monitoring. Although limited to a single unit, the project is an important contribution to the scant literature on alarm … ER -