Sepsis and Early Warning Score Systems

Abstract

Sepsis is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Early diagnosis and management of sepsis is critical to improving patient prognoses. Surviving sepsis campaign guidelines issued in 2016 encourage health institutions to establish a screening system to identify patients who are at risk of sepsis. In 2012, the Royal College of Physicians in the UK began to advocate replacing local and regional scoring systems with the National Early Warning Score (NEWS), which is optimized for the identification of sepsis. Although many hospitals continue to use other scoring systems, all healthcare organizations are being encouraged to adopt a standardized scoring system to better promote patient safety by facilitating rapid diagnoses and screenings and thus, subsequently, improving decision-making by clinical staffs. NEWS plays a very important role in the treatment of sepsis patients. Although research findings related to this scoring system differ somewhat, they provide an important reference for clinical nursing staffs. Intelligent systems are not comprehensive in terms of their capabilities. However, combining human intelligence with system features and further optimizing the system should contribute significantly to the reduction of mortality risk in patients with sepsis.