ABSTRACT
The modern intensive care unit (ICU) contains increasingly numerous, varied and sophisticated equipment for the support and monitoring of critically ill patients. Auditory alarms are most often used in the ICU ‘because hearing is a primary warning sense’ and has ‘generally omni-directional characteristics'. The difficulty of accurate recognition of auditory warnings in the ICU is known to have had fatal consequences; for instance, a patient death attributed to confusion between the ventilator and ECG alarms. The majority of auditory warnings emitted in an ICU are in fact false alarms, triggered by interference. The chapter highlights the problems facing operators of medical equipment and their associated auditory alarms. Two experiments are designed to investigate aspects of the learning, retention and confusion of ICU alarms. Experiment 1 measured the identification of auditory warnings by experienced ICU nurses, using stimulus sounds recorded in their own unit. Experiment 2 examined the effect of urgency mapping on the learning of paired auditory warnings/clinical situations.
