Background: Failure to promptly recognize clinically deteriorating patients in the hospital leads to delays in critical interventions and worse health outcomes. Current standard practice in patient monitoring on most medical-surgical wards involves vital sign assessment at discrete time points, typically every four to eight hours. More frequent or continuous vital sign monitoring has historically been […]

Background: Assessing vitals at regular intervals can be disruptive to a patient’s rest and unnecessary if the patient is clinically stable. These interruptions may lead to impaired sleep, parental fatigue and anxiety, delayed discharge, and increased cost of care. Moreover, alarm fatigue has been described with over-monitoring of patients, as has the overuse of staff […]

Background: Assessing vitals at regular intervals can be disruptive to a patient’s rest and unnecessary if the patient is clinically stable. These interruptions may lead to impaired sleep, parental fatigue and anxiety, delayed discharge, and increased cost of care. Moreover, alarm fatigue has been described with over-monitoring of patients, as has the overuse of staff […]

Case Presentation: This is a 53‐year‐old woman with a history of asthma since childhood. Over the course of a year her dyspnea and wheezing worsened, severely limiting her functional status. She was treated with multiple courses of antibiotics, pulse steroids, inhaled corticosteroids and combination inhalers without clinical benefit. She self‐referred to a pulmonologist within our […]

Background: Overnight disruptions in sleep during acute care hospitalizations contribute to lower patient satisfaction, higher risk of delirium, and potentially, increased length of stay. One primary offender of quality sleep is high frequency collection of vital signs during overnight hours. Protocols for reduction in collection of overnight vital signs have been successfully implemented at other […]