UCSF Program Drops Sepsis Death Rates:
Bay Area Hospitals See Dramatic Decline in Fatalities
Synapse Staff Report
Thanks to a UCSF program, Bay Area hospitals have reported a dramatic drop in deaths from sepsis.
Nine hospitals in the Bay Area participated for two years in the UCSF program, and found that sepsis deaths dropped on average by 40 percent.
The drop was the result of better screening of patients at risk of developing sepsis and quicker testing of patients. The hospitals involved also were more rigorous in following “best practices” than they had previously.
The program, devised by UCSF’s Integrated Nurse Leadership Program, basically improved the ability of healthcare workers at the hospitals to recognize and treat sepsis much more rapidly than had been the case. The hospitals had an average death rate from sepsis of 27.7 percent in the six months before instituting the UCSF program. By December 2010, that number had dropped to 16.6 percent.
“It’s nothing fancy. We didn’t buy a $20 million piece of equipment. We used the smart intelligence of frontline clinicians,” Julie Kliger, director of UCSF’s Integrated Nurse Leadership Program, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Much of the program is based on common sense. At the participating hospitals, doctors and nurses were on the lookout for potential sepsis cases while administering routine tests for blood pressure, heart rate and temperature. Such vigilance paid off in more rapid treatment, critical in treating a fast-moving disease such as sepsis, better known as blood poisoning.
The participating hospitals were Alameda County Medical Center, Contra Costa County Medical Center, El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Kaiser Fremont, Kaiser Hayward, St. Rose Hospital in Hayward, San Francisco General Hospital, San Mateo Medical Center and Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City.
This article appeared in the April 28, 2011 issue of Synapse.
