Table 2

Nurse-reported alarm burden by practice setting characteristics and nurse demographics

	% and N of nurses who frequently or occasionally…
	Felt overwhelmed by the number of alarms			Delayed response to alarms because can’t step away from another patient/task			Encountered situations where a patient needed urgent attention, but no one responded to alarms			Had work interrupted or delayed by false, nonactionable or non-urgent alarms
	%*	N†	p‡	%*	N†	p‡	%*	N†	p‡	%*	N†	p‡
All nurses (n=3986)	82.9	3262	–	75.6	2970	–	55.4	2164	–	46.0	1793	–
RN education
BSN or higher (n=3215)	82.8	2627	0.915	74.9	2371	0.039	54.1	1703	0.001	45.0	1413	0.006
Non-BSN (n=771)	83.0	635	0.915	78.5	599	0.039	60.7	461	0.001	50.5	380	0.006
RN years of experience
0–5 years (n=1637)	86.3	1400	<0.001	78.4	1272	<0.001	56.3	906	0.024	39.6	632	<0.001
6–10 years (n=779)	85.6	661		77.8	598		58.8	451		44.0	334
11–15 years (n=437)	80.8	345		74.7	318		54.5	232		44.8	192
>15 years (n=1132)	76.8	855		70.4	781		52.0	574		57.3	635
Practice setting
Intensive care unit nurses (n=1547)	80.2	1233	<0.001	68.8	1056	<0.001	44.9	685	<0.001	49.4	746	0.001
Medical and surgical nurses (n=2439)	84.6	2029	<0.001	80.0	1914	<0.001	62.1	1479	<0.001	43.9	1047	0.001
Continuous patient monitoring
Always/sometimes used on nurse’s unit (n=3821)	83.6	3174	<0.001	76.0	2879	0.019	55.5	2092	0.421	46.4	1736	0.049
Never used on nurse’s unit (n=151)	63.3	81	<0.001	66.9	85	0.019	51.9	67	0.421	38.0	54	0.049

*Denominators used to calculate percentages differed from totals in column 1 due to exclusion of missing.
†May not sum to total due to missing.
‡P-value for χ² test.
BSN, bachelor’s of science in nursing.