Let’s be honest, we hear alarms in our sleep, on our drive home, and all the times in between. If you are like me, you’ve wondered if you’ve become immune to the sound. Studies show that there are up to 350 alarms, per bed, per day!1  Even though we set our monitors to be an extra set of eyes (and ears) on our patients to alert us to any change in condition, set our parameters, and ensure our patients are always visible no matter where we are in the unit, alarms are still silenced, overridden, and sometimes drowned out. We are alarm fatigued.

With the recent recall of ventilators because of internal power fluctuations causing them to spontaneously shut down without warning, with or without alarms,2  I want to talk about the importance of correctly setting alarms on both monitors and equipment. Please do not rely on only...

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