I found this article in the AZ Daily Star on an AP report about delays in treatment due to medical devices constantly beeping. The article goes on to say that hospital workers are "desensitized" to the beeping and so ignore the noise, leading to "at least two dozen deaths a year on average," a hospital accrediting group reported. Like alert fatigue, where clinicians ignore alerts because they get so many of them that they override them (a simple workaround). The beeping devices include those that measure blood pressure and heart rate, among other things. Some beep when there's an emergency, and some beep when they're not working. That can lead to noise fatigue and the delay in treating a patient can endanger lives, the accreditation commission says.
Read on...
