Clinical Alarm Fatigue and Fundamentals of Art 101

Abstract

Clinical Alarm Fatigue and Fundamentals of Art 101 How hard could it be? I always enjoyed art in high school. In college, I needed a humanities class, so Fundamentals of Art 101 seemed a reasonable choice. On the first day of class, the professor would flash images on a screen, and we were asked to use our pieces of black or white chalk to draw “light” and “dark” space of the image from the few-second exposure. After 2 weeks of this effort, we grew impatient and a brave student asked, “When are we going to do something?” The professor distributed a gray piece of chalk, and we continued the process for another several weeks—3 times a week—for over an hour each class. Frustrating! Without a “grade” or “test” or “project,” I thought I had signed up for the easiest college credit of my career; many students dropped the course. With only several weeks left in the quarter, thankfully, the professor announced that we should bring a photograph of a family member to our next class. Although anticipating a positive break in our white/gray/black pattern, when asked to “draw” our family member using those same 3 pieces of chalk, we froze. For me—the image of my young sister, who had climbed a tree, smiling back at the camera with her hair blowing in the wind—it was overwhelming. I looked around the room, noticing that most students were staring blindly at the paper as well. Eventually, the professor was at my right shoulder with her stale coffee cup and asked when I planned to start. I mumbled something rather uninspiring. She took a small wooden stylus and pointed at parts of the photograph: “This is light....this is dark, and in another area...this is light...this is dark....” As I eventually applied chalk to paper, first applying white or gray and then black, I found that the image of my sister’s hand began to reveal itself on the page. In healthcare, how often do we examine a problem without really seeing it for the first time? “If we only improve care as much in the next decade as we have in the last, we are failing the American public.”1 As leaders in nursing, there is no need to reiterate the need for innovation and change in our national healthcare system. Christensen, Grossman, and Hwang2 state that “the transformational force that has brought affordability and accessibility to other industries is disruptive innovation. Today’s healthcare industry screams for disruption.”(2p. xlv)