alarmmoeheid

Alarmmoeheid, or alarm fatigue, is a form of desensitization to alarms that occurs when people are exposed to a high volume of alarms, many of which are non-actionable or false. Over time, the perceived urgency of alarms declines, and responders may react more slowly or ignore alarms altogether, increasing the risk of missing critical events.

Causes include a high frequency of alarms, repetitive nuisance alarms, ambiguous or non-actionable alarms, poor alarm design, inadequate staffing, cognitive overload, and fragmented alarm systems that deliver too many notifications from different devices.

Common settings include hospitals and clinics where patient monitoring, infusion pumps, and other medical devices emit alarms; industrial plants and aircraft cabins also present similar risks through equipment alarms and safety alerts; consumer devices may contribute through frequent device alerts in homes.

Consequences can involve delayed response to true emergencies, increased operator workload, alarm desensitization, clinical risk, patient harm, and general stress among staff.

Mitigation efforts focus on alarm management and design improvements: alarm rationalization to remove non-actionable alarms; tiered or grouped alerting; better prioritization and escalation rules; improved alarm visualization; reducing nuisance alarms through maintenance and calibration; staff training and drills; and organizational processes that monitor alarm performance and adjust policies.

Research and guidelines from healthcare safety organizations emphasize coordinated alarm management programs as essential to patient safety. The term is widely used in safety engineering and human factors to describe the adverse effects of excessive alerting on performance.