Malpractice Lawsuit Alleges Alarm Fatigue Contributed To Patient’s Hospital Death: A Pennsylvania medical malpractice wrongful death lawsuit filed on May 18, 2023 alleges that so-called alarm fatigue contributed to the death of a patient who was brought to the hospital with shortness of breath and later died from cardiac arrest after nurses allegedly failed to respond to alarms that the woman was in distress.
Lina Dispensa, who was 71-years-old, was brought to Lehigh Valley Hospital – Pocono on November 28, 2022. She was treated with inhalation therapy and was provided oxygen, including her last treatment on November 29 at 7:38 a.m. Twenty eight minutes later, at 8:06 a.m., she was found on the floor, unresponsive. Medical staff were able to resuscitate her, but she remained in a coma until her family made the difficult decision to remove life support. Dispensa died on December 3, 2022. She left behind her husband, three children, and five grandchildren.
What Is Alarm Fatigue?
“Alarm fatigue” is described as sensory overload when clinicians are exposed to an excessive number of alarms, which can result in desensitization to alarms and missed alarms. Alarm fatigue has been found to have resulted in patient deaths. According to a published article, research found that between 72% and 99% of clinical alarms are false, which has led to alarm fatigue.
The Joint Commission has designated alarm fatigue as a sentinel event: “Many medical devices have alarm systems. These alarm-equipped devices are essential to providing safe care to patients in many health care settings; clinicians depend on these devices for information they need to deliver appropriate care and to guide treatment decisions. However, these devices present a multitude of challenges and opportunities for health care organizations when their alarms create similar sounds, when their default settings are not changed, and when there is a failure to respond to their alarm signals.”
The Joint Commission Sentinel Event database contains 98 reports of alarm events between January 2009 and June 2012. Eighty of those events resulted in patient death. In addition, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) database contains 566 alarm-related patient deaths between January 2005 and June 2010.
The Joint Commission designated alarm fatigue as a National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) in 2014, effective January 1, 2014 for hospitals and critical access hospitals. The NPSG addresses clinical alarms that can compromise patient safety if they are not properly managed, which includes alarms from equipment such as cardiac monitors, IV machines, ventilators, etc. that have visual and/or auditory components. In general, this does not include items such as nurse call systems, alerts from computerized provider order entry (CPOE), or other information technology (IT) systems. Some psychiatric or rehabilitation hospitals may not use alarms that can present a serious safety issue because there is minimal use of medical devices that measure a patient’s physiologic status. In these situations, it is acceptable if the hospital can demonstrate that the issue was considered but a limited number of such devices – or no devices at all – were identified as priorities.
The NPSG requires that as of July 1, 2014, leaders establish alarm system safety as a hospital priority.
If you or a loved one may have been injured (or worse) as a result of alarm fatigue in the United States, you should promptly find a medical malpractice lawyer in your state who may investigate your alarm fatigue medical malpractice claim for you and represent you or your loved one in an alarm fatigue medical malpractice case, if appropriate.
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