In this episode, I’ll discuss the impact of pharmacist involvement on hospital sepsis response teams.
While it makes sense that having someone who focuses on medications on a sepsis response team would lead to faster antibiotic administration times, data supporting this was sparse. That is until a group of authors published in AJHP a single-center, retrospective cohort study of hospitalized adult patients diagnosed with severe sepsis or septic shock seen by a sepsis response team.
167 patient encounters were analyzed and divided into 2 groups based on the presence or absence of a pharmacist as a member of the sepsis response team. The primary endpoint was compliance with the Surviving Sepsis Campaign 1-hour bundle. Time zero was defined as the time an alert was paged to the responding team. Secondary endpoints included rates of compliance with other quality bundles, time to individual bundle component completion, hospital length of stay, and in-hospital mortality.
The authors found that a pharmacist’s presence resulted in improved 1-hour bundle compliance from 44.7% to 60.4%, a difference that was statistically significant. In addition they found an increased rate of antibiotic administration within 1 hour of a sepsis alert page from 59.2% to 84.6%, and a lower median time to antibiotic administration at 51 minutes vs 108 minutes. Both of these metrics were also statistically signifcant in favor of a pahrmacist presence on the team. Rates of other quality bundle compliance, hospital LOS, and mortality were similar between the pharmacist and no pharmacist groups.
The authors concluded:
Pharmacist involvement in a sepsis response team is associated with improved completion of the 1-hour bundle, specifically the early administration of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Early identification of sepsis and alerting a multidisciplinary team remain barriers to optimizing treatment.
This article can provide the evidence to convince administrators that pharmacists should be included on a sepsis reponse team, or the motivation for pharmacists to seek out and join their hospital’s team.
The article in this episode is a selection from my Hospital Pharmacy Academy’s weekly literature digest. Have you ever felt like your physician colleagues are one step ahead of you with new literature developments? Every week, Academy members are provided a summary curated and explained by me of the top hospital pharmacy-related articles published that week from over 20 major journals and sources to save you time and keep you up to date with the literature. To get immediate access, go to pharmacyjoe.com/academy.
If you like this post, check out my book – A Pharmacist’s Guide to Inpatient Medical Emergencies: How to respond to code blue, rapid response calls, and other medical emergencies.
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