Uhhh no, you should do your job....

[Jack7957]

Just noticed this section of the board. Preface - Former job was installing alarm systems at hospitals and nursing homes, so no Alzheimer/Dementia residents can escape, and no one can steal infants/children. With that said...

I'm at a nursing home where we are altering and upgrading their system because the nursing staff was simply turning off the alarms at the main computer, instead of going to the exit doors and seeing why the alarm went off. The maintenance director demonstrated this to me, we set off a stairwell door that was near the nurse station but could not be seen unless you went to it. A nurse went to the computer, cancelled the alarm, and went back to what she was doing, never coming down to the stairwell to see why the alarm went off.

So after several days, I finish the changes, which involved adding more exit doors to their system, moving the computer to a locked office, installing display panels at the nurse station instead, and even adding a 130db siren in the hallway. With this setup, now the only way to silence an alarm is to go to the location where the alarm occurred.

I train the staff on the changes and officially hand over the system to them. 15 minutes later, while I'm packing up my stuff, an alarm starts going off. I go and see what door is going off, and find the maintenance director there with one of the kitchen staff. A resident during lunch cut off their wristband tag and threw it in with the trash. The two of them are digging through the trash bags to find it, so I go back to what I'm doing inside the building. One of the nurses comes up to me and says "that alarm is bothering the residents, can you shut it off?" Now, I couldn't say what I was thinking, so I replied with "that is a real alarm and you'll have to go see what the problem is and resolve it yourselves."

[Sapphire Silk]

This is very scary.

This is why elderly residents wander outdoors in winter and freeze to death. Happened at a local facility in my area a couple of years ago.

[wolfie]

Sounds like the alarm system needs another update. Are the wristband tags completely passive (i.e. no battery)? Probably needs an upgrade to active tags that give off an alert when cut - sensors probably wouldn't need to be any finer of a granularity than a per-room basis, with a "silent" (i.e. only goes off at the nursing station) alarm - but the nurses would probably find a way to ignore it.

[Jack7957]

Tags are battery powered and considered passive (one beacon every 10 seconds) unless they enter the field near an exit portal, then they switch to active mode (10 beacons per second). There are stronger bands with wire running through them, but this facility did not have them at that time.

[Estil]

You may want to be VERY sure that the current system isn't giving off constant false alarms (as our shoplifter alarm constantly did at the grocery store I used to work at) because that would be my guess as to why they might be ignoring the alarms. You most definitely don't want something like this to occur:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boland_Hall_fire

[Aethian]

Even if they were false alarms they still should have been checking WHY the alarm went off. Let them call the company over a upgrade due to false alarms, not because the staff were just ignoring the alarms.

[Jack7957]

They are not false alarms, just lazy employees. I spent six years at that job (did everyone miss where I said it was a FORMER job?) and know how that system, and others we installed, work. These are not like shoplifting systems.

[Aethian]

They are not false alarms, just lazy employees. I spent six years at that job (did everyone miss where I said it was a FORMER job?) and know how that system, and others we installed, work. These are not like shoplifting systems.

A few could have been false alarms. At one house I worked at one back door alarm kept going off for no reason at all. After a remodel of that whole area they found that those false alarms stopped. But then our shut off codes had to be entered in at the area the alarm went off in. Damn annoying to go back, turn off alarm, start to head back and boom the alarm went off again.

So it could have been learned laziness.

[Jack7957]

They weren't false alarms! The reason we were doing this update is management saw their employees ignoring alarms, and decided to make these changes. This is the healthcare industry, not Joe's Knick Knack store. If they were false alarms, not only would we be in trouble with not having a secure system, the facility would be shut down by the state until things were fixed, which means trying to find beds for several hundred residents.

[Aethian]

Take a breath Jack. Now take another.

At the HOUSE (Not Joes Nick Knacks) I worked at we DID have false alarms but it was just on ONE door. Because we had to go to that area we never were able to get into the mode of learned laziness. Something could set off an alarm, that thing that set off the alarm could be gone by the time a nurse checked it, the nurse thinks false alarm. After this happening a few times in that mind they are all false alarms and treated as such. That is a learned laziness. That type of learning spreads like a wild fire. After a few shifts no one is checking the alarms.

Then your company gets called in because of the learned laziness.

[Gilhelmi]

I worked in a nursing home for many years. We did not have bracelets, instead we had door alarms that would go off if the code was not entered.

In the 4 years I worked there, we never had someone turn off an alarm without checking the door. That is because we were drilled as to why the system was in place.

The Nursing homes in my area got door alarms about 20 years ago. Even though I was a child, I remember it well. One night a confused resident decided to go home (even though they had no idea where home was) and left the building. About an hour later (based on when she was last seen) the staff reported to the police that she was missing. I remember, the television making the Emergency Broadcast announcement, and my father leaving to join the search. The next morning, they found the poor woman had accidentally fallen into a cattle trove and drowned.

As you can imagine, this hit our small community very hard. The state board that oversees nursing homes launched an official investigation (any time a resident does not die of natural causes an investigation is launched) and did rule that the death was not from neglect but made several recommendations to prevent this from happening again. Within 6 months the new door alarm system was in place at the facility, and within 2 years a similar system was installed in nearly every facility within 100 miles.

The Director of Nursing had just became a nurse back then. I know she retells the story to all the CNA, CMA, and Nursing classes who train at her nursing home to stress the importance of the alarm systems.

[jedimaster91]

I can't tell you how many times we've had the opposite problem where I work: the bed alarms (supposedly) don't go off when they're supposed to. Every time there's an incident report about a fall, it mentions the bed alarm was on but didn't go off when the patient got out of bed. They're even supposed to play little songs to distinguish them from all the other things that beep in a hospital.

[raudf]

Having been in arcades long enough to develop the hearing... a little twitter of a song can get lost in the general background noise, unless the staff is paying extreme attention and focused on it.

The hospital that my mother-in-law got herself unwillingly admitted (we had her in the ER for altered mental status, but her threatening the doctors, us and then threatening to commit suicide is what really got her admitted) had both the arm bands and the door alarm on the floor for the altered mental status patients. And to add to the paranoia, you had to give the family password to the nurse desk before you were even allowed to talk to the patients via phone!

While getting the rest of their paperwork filled out, I heard an alarm go off and talk about snap to attention! The one working with me on the paperwork (she was making sure that the registration desk missed nothing, especially allergies. These people can barely remember they exist at times, you can't rely on them to remember their allergies!) looked at me, I nodded and she, along with another nearly bolted to the area of the alarm. I felt a lot better about leaving MIL with them.

[Seshat]

I can't tell you how many times we've had the opposite problem where I work: the bed alarms (supposedly) don't go off when they're supposed to. Every time there's an incident report about a fall, it mentions the bed alarm was on but didn't go off when the patient got out of bed. They're even supposed to play little songs to distinguish them from all the other things that beep in a hospital.

Can you put a recording device on it?

Also, instead of a song (or as well as), try something saying 'bed alarm'.

[jedimaster91]

I can't no. I'm just a lowly imaging tech so no one really cares what I think. Besides, my place of employment can barely afford to adequately staff the place, so even if such a bed existed, the bean counters would say we can't afford them.

That and we don't see many beds where I am anyway (I just see the incident reports in the breakroom). We have a hard time getting them through the door, so if at all possible, we want our patients coming down either on a stretcher or in a wheelchair.