Original Research: Alarm Fatigue: Exploring the Adaptive and Maladaptive Coping Strategies of Nurses.

Background: To improve patient safety, hospitals use alarm notification systems to increase nurses' real-time situational awareness of a patient's condition. Such alarms are critical to nurses' clinical decision-making and prioritization, thus helping to improve patient care and care efficiency. But the frequent and often simultaneous ringing of alarms, including many that are false, nonemergent, or nonactionable, has led to overwhelm, alarm distrust, and desensitization, resulting in alarm fatigue.