Managing the Monitors: An Analysis of Alarm Silencing Activities during an Anesthetic Procedure

Patient monitoring devices are designed to assist users in obtaining information on the patient and life-support equipment status. Most of the these devices have built-in visual and auditory alarms, which are to help the user to manage attention allocation. In this presentation we describe an analysis of the interaction between care providers and the monitoring devices during an anesthetic procedure (airway management) for trauma patients in the real environment. The videotapes of 47 cases were analyzed by coding the activities in silencing auditory alarms. In majority of the cases (87%) alarms could be heard yet only a small portion of the cases (6%) contained patient status events that signified by the alarm conditions. Care providers were frequently forced to interrupt clinical tasks to silence alarms. The differences in silencing frequency and rapidity among different monitoring devices suggest that alarms could be designed to be less intrusive and more tolerable, thus making the monitors easier to manage in critical care settings