Throughout the process of this project, my knowledge of the topic of alarm fatigue in nurses has significantly grown. For this project, we have identified the basic topic of alarm fatigue and then dove deeper, looking at factors influencing this, interventions, nurse and patient outcomes, etc. Before doing research and gathering peer reviewed literature and journals, I honestly did not expect there to be so many varying factors and the impact of nurses and patients to be so significant. My team found that alarm fatigue was so relevant that we had plenty of sources to gather information from, and that it is especially relevant considering the nursing shortages the healthcare industry has been facing recently. 

I think everyone in my team can agree that we did not expect alarm fatigue to be such a prevalent problem in today’s nursing society, especially on our clinical floor where we experienced it first-hand. We were able to use our project findings and apply them to the clinical setting, which really helped us while formulating our final proposal. For example, we had discovered that the many different alarms are not only stressful, but overwhelming and intimidating at some points. And sometimes they were just unbearable to listen to, and very distracting when trying to concentrate. I think by being able to experience the problem firsthand helped us be very successful not only in our research for the project, but also in our nursing practice. 

As mentioned previously, my team had found that since our topic was so relevant there was plenty of scholarly and peer reviewed literature to look through. However, a challenge we found that there was almost too much research on the topic, making it difficult to sort through it all and find the best literature for our project. This was definitely overwhelming and stressful to try and navigate through. We were able to collaborate and work together as a team to solve this challenge. We used control settings on our searches to place filters on exactly what we wanted to find, which helped a lot.