Authors
Abdalkarem Fedgash Alsharari, Mostafa Shaban
Published in
Nursing in critical care. Volume 31. Issue 6.
Abstract
Adult intensive care units (ICUs) generate a persistent acoustic burden from alarms, care activity, equipment and communication. This burden can undermine patient rest and contribute to alarm fatigue, cognitive workload and distress among nurses.
To present a nursing-led conceptual framework for addressing alarm-related acoustic burden in adult critical care.
Literature-informed conceptual analysis. A structured purposive evidence map was audited using two PubMed searches run on 9 September 2026 (3377 unique records after PMID deduplication) and citation checking. Twenty-nine selected sources were charted against the five domains. This was not a systematic review; no original data, formal consensus or framework validation was undertaken.
QUIET Care proposes five connected practice domains: quantify and qualify the sound environment; use patient-specific monitoring and alarms; integrate quiet into workflow; engage people and culture; and track, test and learn. It treats the domains as locally adaptable hypotheses and requires explicit safety balancing measures.
QUIET Care is a pragmatic proposal for local co-design and evaluation, not a validated intervention or universal sound target.
The framework may help critical care nurses and leaders organise source mapping, alarm customisation, workflow redesign, team ownership and small safety-monitored tests of change while preserving the audibility of urgent alerts.
PMID:
42952127
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 29 Oct 2026.
Read full publication at:
Please sign in
to see all details.
Advertisement
Stats
- Recommendations n/a n/a positive of 0 vote(s)
- Views 2
- Comments 0