1 Alarm Management Electrocardiographic Lead Management

The chosen project theme integrates the master's essential of Quality Improvement and Safety. The identified competency is the process of using researched evidence to create and coordinate system improvement that will speak to trends in safety and quality (AACN, 2013). The defined project will be to reduce the number of electrocardiographic (ECG) alarms in the microsystem by ensuring appropriate ECG lead placement and changing the patient's lead electrodes daily. My role as the Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL) will be to assess the microsystem to define the problem, ascertain the workflow of the unit, and identify the barriers and needs in order to create a project action plan. The action plan will include staff education, surveillance and auditing for compliance and improvement, and staff rounding to assist with the refreezing process, as defined in Lewin's process change theory (University of San Francisco, 2015) thus ensuring that the new process becomes a routine part of the nursing staff's care. Statement of the Problem Hospitals today contain numerous pieces of equipment that have alert alarms. These pieces of equipment produce innumerable alerts, many of which are unnecessary and/or low-priority. These nonessential alarms cause clinical staff to become desensitized to the alerts. Thi