A Pre-hospital Physician Perspective with David Anderson

Sepsis is a common presentation in the prehospital and retrieval environment, with most cases having a respiratory, urinary or soft tissue origin. However the best practice for identifying and management sepsis in the prehospital environment remains unclear.  Despite sepsis having been a priority for in hospital guidelines and protocols for decades now, relatively little attention has been paid to prehospital sepsis management. Traditional teaching is that early antibiotics in sepsis save lives, however trials examining this are observational and confounded by outdated ICU care. An appropriately sensitive and specific tool for the prehospital identification of sepsis remains elusive. NEWS2 is common and lactate-modified QSOFA emerging (although prehospital lactate measurement remains difficult). The role of prehospital antibiotics, and the most appropriate one are also unclear. Most ambulance services that carry antibiotics use ceftriaxone. The retrieval environment is similar, with sepsis probably being the single commonest reason to call a retrieval service.

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