What night shifts on a cardiology ward taught me about alert fatigue
Before I became an engineer I was a nurse for six years, the last three on a cardiology ward. I want to describe one thing from that time, because I see the same pattern now in software: in dashboards, in on-call rotations, and in the apps we build for clinicians. On a night shift you hear alarms all the time. The monitor alarms when a patient turns over and an electrode slips. It alarms when the saturation probe…