Australia: Sepsis - time for doctors to “get their house in order”
DOCTORS must get their “house in order” when talking about sepsis, says a leading infectious diseases physician who is supporting calls for a national plan to reduce preventable deaths and disability from the condition.
In the MJA, experts have called for a nationwide plan to better identify and manage sepsis, which was defined as “life-threatening organ dysfunction due to a dysregulated host response to infection”.
According to estimates cited in the MJA, there were 18 000 episodes of sepsis annually in Australia, and at least 5000 deaths, which disproportionately affected the very young, the very old and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The MJA authors noted that capturing data on sepsis was challenging because hospital coding significantly undercounted the burden of disease. But, they added, the development of electronic medical records may improve the capacity to identify sepsis in real time and more accurately assess its incidence.