Nursing care for the septic patient
Abstract
Sepsis is the systemic inflammatory response to infection which can be caused by a myriad of diseases or injuries. Septic patients require extensive nursing care and offer many unique nursing challenges. While sepsis is poorly defined in veterinary medicine, the last 10 years has yielded numerous studies, committees and research on the subject. Understanding the pathophysiology of sepsis allows for better nursing care to be offered.
Sepsis is the systemic inflammatory response to infection. There are a myriad of diseases or injuries that can cause a patient to become septic. In 1991 the American College of Chest Physicians/Society of Critical Care Medicine (ACCP/SCCM) Consensus Conference Committee met and established standards that defined sepsis in human medicine (Balk et al, 1992). Up until that time the use of words such as infection, bacteraemia, septic shock and sepsis were being used interchangeably. While there are no of-ficial set of standards used to diagnose sepsis in veterinary medicine, there have been numerous studies in recent years working on creating such standards.
The 1991 the ACCP/SCCM Consensus Conference Committee identified common abnormalities in septic human patients with regards to temperature, heart rate, respiratory parameters, and the leukogram (Balk et al, 1992). In 2001 these criteria were expanded to include parameters for systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) (Otto, 2011). During the ACCP/SCCM Conference several definitions were de-fined (Box 1). While these terms have not been of-ficially defined in veterinary medicine for the purposes of this paper the ACCP/SCCM terminology will apply.
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