Alarm management in a single-patient room intensive care units

An international trend in intensive care is the shift from open, bay area intensive care units towards single-patient room care, since this is considered optimal for patient healing and family privacy. However, in the intensive care setting, an increasing number of devices and parameters are being used to treat and monitor the patient. This leads to an increase in the number of alarms that are needed to notify caretakers. In single room care, additional technology is also necessary in order to distribute alarms from the source to the healthcare worker's location such as a distributed alarming system. While single-room care creates a better environment for healing, it poses challenges for managing alarms. This book chapter discusses alarm management in detail. An example of alarm management in a single-patient intensive care situation along with the prevalent rates of different alarms for an adult and a neonatal ICU (NICU) in a general teaching hospital are also discussed. Finally, methods towards improving the alarm chain and reducing alarm pressure are proposed.