Sepsis mortality plummets at Good Samaritan

By Nassia Duncan, Good Samaritan Sepsis Coordinator

For the past two years, Good Samaritan has been on a journey to improve our sepsis care. Sepsis is a danger on every unit and a top cause of hospital mortality. In its early stages, it is difficult to identify and easy to treat. As it progresses, the switch flips: It becomes easy to identify and difficult to treat. As a team, you took on the challenge of standardizing screening and care to identify sepsis and improve outcomes.

The Good Samaritan is a story of one man stopping to notice what others had walked past. This year, the clinicians and caregivers of Good Samaritan Hospital lived up to the legend. Due to your dedicated efforts to implement sepsis screening and alert protocols throughout the hospital, sepsis mortality at Good Samaritan has fallen 40 percent from spring 2022. We’ve also raised our SEP-1 bundle compliance this year by 10 percent. Every day, you stop to notice the signs and symptoms of sepsis and take rapid action and you save lives.

As we look forward to a new year, I would encourage you to glance back and see how far we’ve come. From having no standard for identification or alert, each department now has a sepsis screen, early warning BPA and nursing protocol. On every unit, physicians, providers and nurses have been more alert to sepsis, catching it early and often.

In 2024, we will continue to work on the sepsis screening and alert process, identifying opportunities for further improvement. Your feedback has been heard, and the update launched this month has further reduced false alarms and provides additional options in Epic for clinicians. Please continue to share your feedback with unit leaders and with me, your sepsis coordinator, so that we can optimize our tools and increase their use.

To all our clinicians and caregivers, and to the families who celebrate together this year because of your efforts, I wish you a very happy holiday season.