This is one problem that everybody from Arizona medical malpractice attorneys to doctors, hospitals and monitor manufacturers seem to agree is a serious one. However, there are no serious solutions to deal with the high numbers of patient injuries and deaths that occur every year from patient alarms that were neglected. According to estimates, between 2005 and 2010, approximately 200 people died as a result of ignored patient alarms.

A nurse on an average working day in an American hospital will have to deal with several monitor alarms. Many of these alarms are linked to the nurses’ cell phones and pagers, to make sure that they don't miss a single alarm. Ironically, the large number of alarms beeping continually desensitizes nurses to their sound, causing them to ignore the alarms, with possibly catastrophic consequences.

Everybody agrees that these incidents are preventable. The question is how to prevent them. Monitor manufacturers are working on sophisticated new technologies that can reduce the numbers of false alarms. There are efforts on to develop alarms that can more accurately gauge whether a person is in critical condition, before sounding an alert. Hospitals and doctors however, are not in favor of dependence on technology to determine whether a patient needs urgent help. Arizona hospital malpractice lawyers would agree. There seems to be only so much that medical technology can do to reduce what is known in the healthcare sector as “alarm fatigue.”

However, what hospitals can do to prevent such alarm fatigue is to employ more numbers of nurses. Many incidences where nurses ignore alarms can be traced to the fact that they're overstressed and have too many patients in their care at any given moment. If the numbers of patients assigned to a nurse can be reduced, there is a lower likelihood that a nurse will miss an alarm, due to desensitization.