Abstract
Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from more acute life-threatening indications for blood transfusion compared with high-income countries [1]. The commonest 'systems failure' contributing to perioperative death in low-resource settings is the timely availability of correctly cross-matched blood products [2]. Often this is not the result of an absolute shortage of blood products, but failure in the chain of supply and distribution. We audited an early step in this chain, the quality of blood requests, at the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka, Zambia. UTH does not have a formal blood request form, and only the cancer diseases hospital (CDH) has a blood request form developed by the blood bank.
Highlights
To assess cerebral hemodynamics in an experimental sepsis model
Healthy bowel function is an important factor when judging the advisability of early enteral nutrition in critically ill patients
Sepsis is defined as the presence of infection with systemic signs of infection, and severe sepsis as sepsis plus sepsis-induced organ dysfunction or tissue hypoperfusion [1]
Summary
We evaluated platelet activation markers as potential predictive markers of sepsis and of mortality among four commonly encountered populations of patients admitted to ICUs. Methods Ninety-nine non-infected ICU patients were prospectively screened at day 1 (T1) and day 3 (T2) of admission after elective cardiac surgery, trauma, acute neurologic dysfunction or prolonged ventilation (>48 hours). The present study was performed with the aim of assessing whether nursing and physician staff were able to identify patients in need of critical care using only clinical judgment and to compare this with the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) Methods This was a prospective cohort study of all adult patients with a first-time admission to a medical admission unit at a 450-bed regional teaching hospital over a 3-month period in 2010.
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