Sepsis Screening Tools: Importance and Application

Sepsis screening tools are diagnostic instruments or protocols used by healthcare providers to identify and assess patients at risk of developing sepsis, a life-threatening condition.

Sepsis Screening Tools FAQ

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Are there screening tools for sepsis?

Because of the non-specific nature of the initial signs and symptoms, delays in recognition are all too common. To improve the early identification of sepsis, screening tools have been developed, and several papers have described their results. This article reviews the available sepsis screening tools.

What is a sepsis toolkit?

The toolkit is based on findings of our sepsis bundle of care program and the ‘Think sepsis. Act fast.’ scaling collaboration. For more background on these projects and their outcomes, see Appendix 1. quality improvement tools and templates.

Can a sepsis screening tool be applied uniformly?

No single sepsis screening tool can be applied uniformly to neonatal, paediatric, maternal and adult populations, or system-wide across prehospital, emergency and acute care settings 2.2. Prehospital setting - the use of a screening tool improves sepsis detection but there are insufficient data to recommend any one tool 2.3.

How effective is a sepsis screening tool?

Performance of screening tools varied widely, especially in the prehospital setting. More research is needed to determine the optimal variables and thresholds for a sepsis screening tool. There was moderate evidence of process measure improvement in the hospital setting with screening, including time to antibiotics.

What tools are used to diagnose sepsis?

Of the 124 included studies, most were retrospective cohort (49.2%) in adults (83.9%) within the emergency department (44.4%). The most commonly evaluated sepsis tools were qSOFA (12 studies) and SIRS (11 studies) with a median sensitivity of 28.0% versus 51.0% and a specificity of 98.0% versus 82.0%, respectively, for sepsis diagnosis.

Does a sepsis screening tool affect process timeliness measures?

Both prehospital studies showed that use of a sepsis screening tool affected process timeliness measures, although only one effect reached significance; these studies had sample sizes of less than 300 and a moderate risk of bias.