How should hospitals improve the safety of clinical alarm systems?

Managing alarm signals effectively is essential for improving the safety of clinical alarm systems. Hospitals often face the challenge of alarm fatigue; when alarms are too frequent or not clinically significant, staff may become desensitized to them. Effective management involves ensuring that the alarms are appropriately set for each patient's individual needs, prioritizing alarms based on clinical relevance, and implementing customizable alarm settings that reduce unnecessary sounds while ensuring critical alarms remain audible. By doing so, healthcare providers can enhance patient safety, as vital alarms will be more likely to capture attention and lead to timely interventions.

The other options may contribute to the overall atmosphere of the clinical environment but do not address the core issue of alarm overload and the importance of alarm relevance directly. Increasing alarms can compound the problem, lowering alarm volume can risk missing critical alerts, and simply increasing training hours without focused strategies on alarm management would not directly resolve the underlying issues that contribute to alarm-related safety concerns.