Responding to Clinical Alarms: A Challenge to Users in ICU/CCU

Clinical alarm plays a critical role to alert clinician to situations that require urgent response. However, alarms are ignored or switched off. The objective of the study is to identify user response, propose response time and recommendation to improve user response. A survey was carried out in Malaysia with 324 clinicians, 279(86.1%) were registered nurses and medical assistants (MA) and 45(13.9%) were medical doctors. The findings show that 16.0% of the respondents switch off the alarm, 20.4% silence the alarm, 14.5% delayed to respond and 20% ignored the alarm. The findings indicate 78.1% of the respondent recommended less than 10sec for ´immediate respond´ for high risk alarm, 72.5% recommended less than 60sec for ´prompt respond´ for medium risk alarms and 43.2% recommended delayed respond for low risk alarm should not be specified. The incorporation of response time based on risk in the design of alarm can improve user alarm response.