The nurse desk is a desk. If the desk literally fails, you have serious issues, and your average multiple person desk is well enough engineered that there isn’t a single piece that can fail and take out the entire desk. But there are generally multiple nurses at the nurse desk, and there are often multiple desks, too. Also, you could hook the monitoring system up to the PA system.
edit: when I say hooking it to the PA system, I mean that, if no one acknowledges the light or computer message or whatever, then an announcement could play after a set delay.
edit: when I say hooking it to the PA system, I mean that, if no one acknowledges the light or computer message or whatever, then an announcement could play after a set delay.