Paper Example on Definition and Specificity of Sepsis

The definition of sepsis has been debated over, but the Sepsis Alliance have adopted a definition that suggests that it is the bodys life-threatening response and overwhelming response to infection. The result can be the damage to the tissues, failure of organs or death in the worst case scenarios (Kissoon, Daniels, van der Poll, Finfer, and Reinhart 2016). In essence, it is a systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) that results from an infection and for a patient to qualify for it; there are various criteria that they should meet. This involved at least two symptoms from a group of signs that are infectious. First, either very high or very low temperatures compared to the standard, a high heart rate that is not attributable to existing health conditions, respiration rate greater than 20 and theirs is no preexisting condition, hypotension, mottling of the skin and altered mental status among other factors. Apparently, using these characteristics one can easily detect the existence of sepsis and take precautionary measures early enough in order to avert negative outcomes.

The ability to have various symptoms that are prevalent helps ensure that the patients diagnosis can be done early. On the other hand, using sepsis as a measure has some weaknesses in its application as a measure of quality. It is possible for a patient to show those characteristics yet not have sepsis. In some situation that is rare, one can assume the lactate levels, high heart rate, and respiration rates are attributable to sepsis yet another health condition was developing. Another weakness is using this measure the fact that two symptoms among many symptoms is a very small percentage to be able to infer that sepsis is in existence. In any case, other health conditions can show the same symptoms. Thus if accurate diagnosis is not done with the consistent investigation, one may realize issues of readmission resulting from poor diagnosis. Finally, the correct outcome of sepsis will be dependent on the good communication of health practitioners in an organization. Otherwise, if that is absent, the outcome of this measure may be compromised.

Cost Effectiveness of Sepsis

Sepsis performance measurement can be an important indicator of the quality of health care in a hospital organization. However, this can limited depending on the financial resources of an organization. For instance, some hospitals may lack sufficient human and financial resources to use sepsis. The sepsis protocol is associated with high treatment and mortality costs which can soar high depending on the nature of health situation (Durston, 2014). The time factor also increases the cost because of the need to have cohort studies and control groups to measure the outcome between different groups. Thus, the strength of this measure is that when the resources are available, it is possible to attain the desired outcomes through using various benchmarks of previous performance and historical performances. The weakness of this performance measure is that for every increment in the application of the sepsis performance measure, there was a considerable increase in the cost per patient. The fact that some patients are not able to cater for the costs increases the limitation of sepsis measure. Further, hospitals with high-end patients may be placed at an advantage over other others as they are able to take care of the sepsis protocol that is crucial in their medical provision.

References

Durston, W. (2014). Does adoption of a regional sepsis protocol reduce mortality?. The American journal of emergency medicine, 32(3), 280.

Kissoon, N., Daniels, R., van der Poll, T., Finfer, S., & Reinhart, K. (2016). SepsisThe Final Common Pathway to Death From Multiple Organ Failure in Infection. Critical care medicine, 44(6), e446.