Nursing care for the septic patient

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.