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Sepsis is a life-threatening condition that affects around 30 million people annually across the globe (Fleischmann et al., 2016). In addition to its global burden, sepsis is one of the leading causes of preventable deaths affecting hospitalized patients and is directly responsible for one out of every three hospital related deaths (Centers for Disease, Control and Prevention [CDC], 2016; Rhee et al., 2019). On average, patients with a diagnosis of sepsis may spend 6.5 days in the hospital compared to patients without this diagnosis. The average cost for patients being treated for sepsis is estimated to be $16 billion annually and growing (Armstrong-Briley et al., 2015). As the sepsis incidence continues to grow, the need for a gold standard recognition and treatment process is imperative towards reducing morbidity, mortality, and hospital costs associated with a sepsis diagnosis.
The Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines have designated a 1-hour window for the start of a five-step sepsis care bundle to be initiated at the first recognition of sepsis criteria (Rhodes et al., 2017). Care bundles are a set of interventions that, when used together, maximize best outcomes. Early recognition of sepsis by nurses using protocols containing screening tools and therapeutic interventions have been shown to be one of the most important ways to reduce morbidity and mortality by leading to early fluid resuscitation, intravenous antibiotic therapy, and control of the source of infection.
Nurse driven protocols give nurses more autonomy in decision making processes and have been successfully correlated with a decrease in poor patient outcomes (Mattison et al., 2016). Nurses can participate in these protocols using sepsis screening tools. The recommended environment to conduct sepsis screenings is in the medical-surgical settings, emergency departments, and intensive-care units. However, it is a tool that...