Straight talk with...Phillip Dellinger

Abstract

Phillip Dellinger has seen his fair share of people go into septic shock. As head of the division of critical-care medicine and director of the medical and surgical intensive care unit (ICU) at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, Dellinger ensures that doctors follow best practice when treating sepsis. But his influence on sepsis protocols goes far beyond the US Northeast. In 2002, Dellinger, along with Graham Ramsay of Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford, UK, and Mitchell Levy of Brown University's Alpert Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island, proposed both the concept and the plan for the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, a massive international effort aimed at improving the treatment of severe sepsis and reducing the high rate of mortality associated with the condition.Ten years on, the Surviving Sepsis Campaign has successfully developed a series of best-practice criteria—the International Guidelines on the Management of Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock, which are currently being revised under Dellinger's leadership—as well as engaged physicians and the general public around the world in a broad educational program to warn about the threat posed by the disease. The campaign has also engendered controversy—notably, accusations that the initiative served as little more than a marketing tool for Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Xigris (drotrecogin alfa), which was the only approved therapy specifically for the treatment of sepsis over the past decade. But Dellinger stands by the campaign's records, and he argues that it has helped saved countless numbers of people from a deadly disease. He spoke with Roxanne Khamsi about the struggle to catalyze change in the sepsis field.