Modification of an external low-pressure ventilator alarm to allow its remote use for isolated patients.
The problem of patients in isolation becoming disconnected from their ventilator systems is a serious one, as the closed doors of an isolation room usually prevent hospital personnel outside the room from hearing or seeing standard ventilator alarms To overcome this potentially life-threatening problem, we modified a standard external low-pressure alarm to accept a simple, inexpensively built remote warning system. In use on 23 patients in our intensive care unit over a 7-month period, this system proved to be a reliable and cost-effective means of warning hospital personnel of possibly life-threatening ventilator disconnects on isolated patients.
D004868:Equipment Failure; D006746:Hospital Bed Capacity, 500 and over; D006801:Humans; D009518:New York; D010356:Patient Isolation; D012122:Ventilators, Mechanical / Q000592:standards*