Commentary

The Surviving Sepsis Campaign sepsis change bundles and clinical practice

R Phillip Dellinger¹ and Jean-Louis Vincent²

¹Section of Critical Care Medicine, Cooper University Hospital, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Camden, New Jersey, USA

²Department of Intensive Care, Erasme Hospital, Free University of Brussels, Route de Lennik 808, 1070 Brussels, Belgium

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Critical Care 2005, 9:653-654doi:10.1186/cc3952

Published:	25 November 2005

See related research article http://ccforum.com/content/9/6/R764

Abstract

The Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC) is an international effort to reduce mortality in severe sepsis and septic shock. The campaign included the creation of evidence-based guidelines sponsored and endorsed by 11 international organizations. From these guidelines, sepsis change bundles for initial resuscitation (6 hours) and management (24 hours) were created as a performance improvement tool. In this issue of Critical Care, Gao et al. have evaluated performance at their institution by using a close adaptation of the two SSC bundle sets and demonstrated an association between 100% compliance with the bundle elements and clinical outcome. The next step will be to demonstrate that the use of education and feedback for performance improvement will increase compliance and decrease mortality in the patient population in general.