Preventing patient violence in hospitals: Applying critical decision method interviews to understand how skilled staff think and act differently.

Aims: Our aims were to understand how hospital staff who are skilled at managing aggressive patients recognize and respond to patient aggression and to compare the approaches of skilled staff to the experiences of staff who were recently involved in incidents of patient violence.

Background: Violence from patients toward staff is prevalent and increasing. There is a need for greater understanding of effective approaches to managing patient aggression in a wide variety of hospital settings.

Effect of Remote Cardiac Monitoring System Design on Response Time to Critical Arrhythmias.

Introduction: In many hospitals across the country, electrocardiograms of multiple at-risk patients are monitored remotely by telemetry monitor watchers in a central location. However, there is limited evidence regarding best practices for designing these cardiac monitoring systems to ensure prompt detection and response to life-threatening events. To identify factors that may affect monitoring efficiency, we simulated critical arrhythmias in inpatient units with different monitoring systems and compared their efficiency in communicating the arrhythmias to a first responder.

Organizing Audible Alarm Sounds in the Hospital: A Card-Sorting Study.

In hospitals, clinicians are presented with varied and disorganized alarm sounds from disparate devices. While there has been attention to reducing inactionable alarms to address alarm overload, little effort has focused on organizing, simplifying, or improving the informativeness of alarms. We sought to elicit nurses' tacit interpretation of alarm events to create an organizational structure to inform the design of advanced alarm sounds or integrated alert systems.