I have met clinicians setting their inferior limit alarm for apnea, in critically ill children, at 5 seconds; cannot understand this because pauses in ventilation of 5 to 10 seconds are normal ventilatory patterns for infants and setting an alarm at 5 seconds will lead to a lot of clinically irelevant and unactionable alarms with the risk of alarm fatigue and staff missing significant events.
Also, requesting an upper alarm limit at 60 seconds is not clinically safe, in my opinion, as such long periods of apnea have a higehr risk of adverse events and require complex clinical examination to determine the level of intervention needed.
let me know what alarm limitis you chose for apnea in your NICU and Pediatric Emergency Departement and what is the reason for your choice of numbers.
Many thaks!
I have no apnea monitors only general monitors, but I have a ratio of one sister per bed in my NICU, so if there is a preterm infant, they watch for breath holding, change in colour and drop in heart rate.
Thank you, Ritu! I think is great that you work in a healthcare system able to provide 1:1 nurse to child ratio; is not the same in my case, especially in Emergency Department.
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Mathematics
- Statistics
- Statistical Techniques
- Meta-Analysis