World Sepsis Day · September 13, 2026
Invest in the whole sepsis pathway
The value of a sepsis program is not established by an alert, a campaign, or one completed bundle. It is established when the health system recognizes possible deterioration, mobilizes a qualified response, protects antimicrobial judgment, completes transfers, and supports recovery with visible ownership.
Observance context. World Sepsis Day is observed on September 13. The official 2026 theme is “Invest in Sepsis – Save Lives.” The Global Sepsis Alliance frames investment across prevention, early detection, health workers, health systems, innovation, people, and preparedness. This article translates that theme into an executive operating agenda. It does not provide individual medical advice or replace local clinical policy, qualified assessment, or treatment guidance.
The executive investment case
Fund reliability across the pathway, not isolated activity
World Sepsis Day gives healthcare executives an opportunity to improve enterprise readiness by strengthening the complete operating system from prevention and early concern through qualified response, referral, recovery, and learning. That opportunity is broader than purchasing an electronic alert or asking clinicians to work faster. Sepsis can emerge in emergency departments, hospital wards, procedural areas, maternity services, pediatric settings, cancer care, long-term care, and the community. The pathway therefore crosses executive portfolios, clinical specialties, information systems, pharmacy, laboratory services, transport, case management, rehabilitation, and community follow-up.
The 2026 campaign theme is useful because it forces a practical question: what exactly is the organization investing in? A credible answer should identify the people, capacity, technology, handoffs, and review mechanisms that make the pathway dependable. A budget line for education is not enough if staff cannot obtain a rapid assessment. An alert is not enough if it reaches an overloaded receiver. A response protocol is not enough if source-specific antibiotic choices are difficult to place. A successful inpatient episode is not enough if the survivor leaves without an understandable recovery plan or a responsible follow-up team.
Recent evidence argues for restraint as well as action. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of seven randomized studies involving 3,409 patients found no statistically significant mortality, antibiotic-time, or length-of-stay benefit from early warning systems overall. The pooled mortality odds ratio was 0.84, but its 95% confidence interval crossed the line of no effect, and the evidence was rated low because of bias and imprecision.9 A 2026 multi-methods evaluation of digital alerting across National Health Service trusts likewise showed that implementation, workflow, local context, and data quality influence whether an alert supports action.6 These findings reinforce the same point: alert performance depends on design, setting, response behavior, and balancing effects.
Leaders should therefore avoid treating technology adoption as the outcome. The investment decision is whether the organization can build a monitored sociotechnical system around the tool. That system needs a defined eligible population, a known alert threshold, a named receiver, an expected response, a way to manage false positives and missed cases, and a review process for downstream effects. It also needs a safe method for changing or retiring the tool when local validation shows that burden exceeds value.
The same discipline applies to education. A 2026 implementation study in a high-complexity Colombian hospital evaluated a standardized strategy to improve operational Code Sepsis knowledge.3 Education can strengthen shared mental models, but knowledge scores do not establish bedside reliability. Executives should connect education to observation of work, simulation of handoffs, competency verification, coverage plans, and outcome review. Training becomes an investment when it changes the conditions under which teams act, not when it simply records attendance.
Evidence chart
Ninety-day outcomes in the STAR transition trial
Horizontal scale: 0% to 55%. Unit: percent of randomized participants with the specified outcome by 90 days after discharge.
| Outcome | STAR, n = 2,122 | Usual care, n = 1,426 | Adjusted odds ratio | 95% confidence interval |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Readmission or death | 1,023 (48.2%) | 684 (48.0%) | 1.05 | 0.90-1.24 |
| Death | 367 (17.3%) | 292 (20.5%) | 0.88 | 0.77-0.99 |
| Readmission | 763 (35.9%) | 478 (33.5%) | 1.13 | 0.92-1.38 |
Board-level question
Can leadership show where each sepsis investment changes capacity, ownership, response reliability, equity, or recovery, and can it identify the balancing effects that would trigger redesign?
Recognition and response
Make recognition an owned process, not an unattended alarm
Recognition begins before a score. Patients and family members may notice a change that is difficult to name, and staff may see a pattern before a threshold is crossed. In a qualitative interview study, patients and family members described symptoms that appeared gradually, felt unfamiliar, and then worsened. Family members were often the people who recognized that the situation had become serious.16 The executive implication is concrete: the operating model should treat the patient’s change from baseline and a family concern as legitimate inputs to assessment, not as noise outside the algorithm.
Electronic screening can expand surveillance, but the response route determines whether detection becomes action. The 2026 multi-method evaluation of digital sepsis alerts across National Health Service trusts found that implementation processes, local context, data quality, and workflow all shaped effectiveness.6 A tool may appear identical on two wards while producing different outcomes because the receiving roles, escalation practices, staffing, and capacity differ. An alert governance group should therefore include clinical operations, nursing, physicians, laboratory, pharmacy, informatics, quality, and frontline users. It should review both statistical performance and the human work created by the alert.
Surveillance definitions also require governance. A 2026 national pediatric study used clinical electronic health record data to estimate sepsis burden across millions of hospitalizations and validated the definition through record review. The clinical definition showed higher sensitivity than administrative coding with comparable specificity, yet it did not capture every physician-adjudicated case.5 For executives, this distinction matters. A surveillance definition can support trend monitoring and comparison, but it is not automatically a bedside diagnostic rule. Reports should state their intended use, population, exclusions, validation results, and known blind spots.
Once concern is raised, the route must make the next action clear. Local policy should define who performs a qualified assessment, how diagnostic uncertainty is managed, when pharmacy and laboratory services are engaged, what prompts escalation, and how a possible transfer is initiated. The route should also preserve clinical judgment. In a 2026 prospective observational study of 138 ICU patients, adherence varied across 17 guideline recommendations, with important gaps in screening practice, thromboprophylaxis choice, and ventilatory strategies.7 A scorecard that reports one aggregate compliance percentage can hide clinically important variation between components.
Executives should test the route under realistic conditions: a busy night shift, a patient arriving from a skilled nursing facility with incomplete information, a language need, a delayed laboratory result, a rural site arranging transfer, or a ward without immediate critical-care capacity. Simulation should include a failed first contact and an unavailable receiving bed. A pathway is not reliable until the organization knows what happens when the expected resource is missing.
Process flowchart
A closed-loop route from concern to recovery
- Recognize concernOwner: frontline team. Accept patient, family, staff, vital-sign, and electronic signals.
- Qualify and assessOwner: designated clinician. Apply local policy, clinical judgment, and escalation criteria.
- Coordinate responseOwner: response lead. Align diagnostics, source evaluation, pharmacy, and treatment workflow.
- Escalate or transferOwner: sending clinician and operations. Obtain acceptance and maintain responsibility until handoff.
- Review dailyOwner: clinical team. Reassess diagnosis, response, antimicrobial plan, function, and care goals.
- Transition and confirmOwner: transition lead. Complete discharge readiness, follow-up, recovery screening, and feedback.
Access, equity, and transfer
Protect the pathway where distance, language, and capacity create friction
Sepsis reliability is an access issue as much as a clinical issue. A person may need to recognize a worsening condition, decide to seek help, reach a facility, communicate a change from baseline, and move between levels of care. Each step can be affected by transportation, rural distance, health literacy, language, disability, insurance, caregiving responsibilities, prior experience, and trust. A campaign that tells people to act quickly without examining whether the receiving system can respond creates an ethical and operational mismatch.
A 2024 rapid systematic review examined 50 studies addressing socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, community factors, medical needs, and pregnancy or maternity. It found associations between sepsis morbidity or mortality and several inequality-related factors, but results were heterogeneous and most studies came from the United States.12 Leaders should not convert those mixed findings into a simplistic ranking. They should use them to justify local stratification, listening, and pathway review. Local dashboards need clear denominators and should examine where patients enter, how quickly concerns are acknowledged, whether language assistance is used, where transfers stall, and which groups experience unplanned returns.
Equity also extends beyond survival. In a New York acute-care dataset, speech-language pathology utilization among patients with oropharyngeal dysphagia was lower for several racial and ethnic groups, with particularly notable disparities in the sepsis subgroup.13 This study does not prove why the difference occurred, and it is specific to one service and dataset. It does show why executives should inspect access to rehabilitation and functional assessment after the acute episode. A pathway can deliver rapid inpatient treatment while still producing unequal access to recovery services.
Rural transfer is another critical boundary. A 2026 multicenter cohort of 1,191 adults treated in a rural emergency telemedicine network found similar three-hour bundle adherence among transferred and nontransferred patients, but transfer was associated with a longer emergency-department stay.1 The study does not establish that transfer caused worse outcomes. It highlights the need to measure the transfer process itself: time to acceptance, transport availability, information completeness, treatment continuity, responsibility during delay, and safe alternatives when the intended destination cannot accept the patient.
The sending organization must remain accountable until the receiver accepts the handoff. That means maintaining clinical oversight, updating the receiving team when the condition changes, ensuring current orders and results travel with the person, and recording who owns unresolved tasks. Transfer centers should make escalation visible to operations leadership rather than allowing delays to remain buried in telephone notes. Telemedicine can support expertise, but it does not replace transport capacity, bed availability, or local stabilization resources.
Qualitative fishbone
Where concern can lose time or ownership
Speed with antimicrobial judgment
Design rapid response and stewardship as one operating responsibility
Sepsis programs often experience tension between rapid antimicrobial administration and responsible antibiotic selection. Treating these goals as competing programs creates predictable friction. The better design connects them. Emergency, infectious-disease, pharmacy, laboratory, and stewardship leaders should agree on how diagnostic uncertainty, likely source, allergy history, local resistance patterns, organ function, prior exposure, culture collection, and reassessment fit into the local pathway. The public article should not prescribe those choices. The executive system should make qualified choices easier to execute and easier to review.
A 2026 single-center retrospective study evaluated antibiotic ordering across three periods: no sepsis order set, a general broad-spectrum order set, and an infectious-source-specific order set. Across 13,764 encounters, use of the order set increased, narrow-spectrum beta-lactam ordering increased, antipseudomonal beta-lactam ordering decreased, and ordering of selected agents associated with higher adverse-effect risk declined.2 Because the study was observational and compared time periods, it cannot prove that the order set caused every change. It does provide a strong operational question: does the electronic workflow help clinicians express source-specific judgment, or does it default everyone toward the broadest option?
Smaller improvement studies show why process measures need outcome context. At a 371-bed community hospital, an inpatient Code Sepsis protocol improved time to antibiotic administration but did not significantly change 30-day mortality, length of stay, or readmission in a 138-patient retrospective cohort.15 An emergency-department performance program with education, audits, feedback, screening, and a multidisciplinary response team reduced time to antibiotics from 143 to 66 minutes and improved several process measures, but did not demonstrate improvement in most patient outcomes.17 These studies support workflow improvement while cautioning against claiming that a faster process automatically caused better survival.
An executive dashboard should therefore connect speed, appropriateness, and reassessment. Measures might include time from qualified concern to response, proportion of eligible encounters using a source-specific pathway, documented review after new diagnostic information, antimicrobial adjustment when appropriate, culture quality, adverse drug events, resistant organisms, and C. difficile. Each needs a precise definition and a clinical owner. Leaders should review outliers with case context, not use a single clock to judge complex care.
Stewardship also needs operational capacity. A source-specific order set fails if recommended agents are unavailable, allergy information is incomplete, pharmacy verification is delayed, or laboratory turnaround prevents timely reassessment. The investment plan should identify dependencies and failure modes. It should also protect clinicians from conflicting performance incentives. If one metric rewards broad administration while another penalizes broad use without reconciling uncertainty and timing, the organization has designed the conflict into the work.
Enterprise operating model
Give the sepsis system a visible executive owner
Sepsis crosses too many boundaries to remain an informal clinical project. A designated executive sponsor should be accountable for convening the system, removing barriers, and reporting unresolved risks. Clinical authority should remain with qualified leaders, but enterprise reliability requires operations, technology, pharmacy, workforce, finance, patient experience, and community interfaces. The sponsor does not direct individual care. The sponsor ensures that the conditions for safe care are present and that known gaps receive decisions.
The governance group should maintain one current pathway map and one measure dictionary. It should know which populations and settings are included, how local definitions differ, and where exceptions occur. Pediatric, maternal, oncology, and long-term-care pathways may require distinct policies and expertise. The 2026 pediatric surveillance study shows that scalable electronic definitions can improve population measurement, but validation still reveals missed cases and context-specific limits.5 One enterprise dashboard should not erase those differences.
Workforce design deserves equal attention. Education should be role specific, repeated, and tested under realistic conditions. The Colombian implementation study supports standardized operational education, while the 2026 adherence study shows that practice gaps can persist even where foundational components are strong.37 Leaders should pair knowledge measures with observed response, escalation quality, order-set use, handoff completeness, and staff confidence. They should also examine whether training reaches nights, weekends, contract staff, rural affiliates, and teams with high turnover.
Technology governance should require local validation before and after deployment. Leaders need alert volume, positive predictive value where appropriate, response rate, time to acknowledgment, missed-case review, overrides, burden by role, and balancing outcomes. The 2025 meta-analysis and 2026 digital-alert evaluation show why a tool cannot be separated from implementation context.69 An alert that performs acceptably in development may still fail when data are delayed, workflows change, or staffing patterns shift.
Patient and family participation should be part of governance, not a ceremonial review at the end. The qualitative onset study shows that families may recognize seriousness before the condition is named.16 Survivors can identify gaps in explanation, function, follow-up, and recovery support that inpatient metrics overlook. Leaders should compensate participants appropriately, provide accessible materials, and close the feedback loop by explaining what changed and what could not yet change.
Operating-system diagram
The accountable sepsis investment system
Central accountable hub: One executive sponsor and multidisciplinary governance group maintain the pathway, measure definitions, exception queue, and improvement agenda.
Hospital-to-home reliability
Design recovery before the discharge order is signed
Survival is not the final endpoint of a sepsis pathway. Survivors may face physical weakness, cognitive changes, emotional distress, medication complexity, new functional needs, fragmented specialty care, and uncertainty about when to seek help. Families may become coordinators without preparation. A health system that measures only inpatient mortality and length of stay cannot see whether the transition supports recovery.
Discharge readiness should be assessed, not assumed. A 2026 study of 330 older sepsis survivors found that discharge readiness was influenced by the quality of discharge teaching, length of hospitalization, payment method, and self-efficacy. Lower readiness was associated with higher 30-day unplanned readmission.4 Because the study was cross-sectional and conducted at one infectious-disease center in China, it does not prove that improving a readiness score will prevent readmission everywhere. It does support a structured conversation about understanding, confidence, resources, and the ability to carry out the plan.
Population-level transition data show how intensively survivors use care. In a German cohort of 234,874 sepsis survivors, 94.4% had a general-practitioner visit, 47.7% had at least one readmission, and 42.8% had at least one emergency treatment within 90 days.11 These values describe one national claims system and should not be used as a local benchmark. They show that the early post-discharge period contains many touchpoints where screening, reconciliation, rehabilitation, and escalation support could be embedded.
Discharge destination also matters. In a study of 7,107 adult sepsis survivors, 23.6% were readmitted within 30 days. Readmission rates differed among skilled nursing, home health, and home settings, although the analysis cannot establish that the setting itself caused return to the hospital because illness severity and comorbidity affect placement.14 Executives should review whether placement matches functional and caregiving needs, whether receiving providers obtain the plan, and whether the survivor knows whom to call when recovery deviates from expectations.
Evidence for post-acute interventions is promising but not definitive. A 2025 systematic review included 14 studies and 383,680 patients. It found signals of benefit from rehabilitation, care coordination, follow-up bundles, and a virtual-reality intervention, but interventions and outcomes varied, and the studies had moderate risk of bias or some concerns.10 The STAR randomized trial did not reduce its primary composite of readmission or mortality, even though the secondary mortality result favored the intervention.8 Leaders should invest in recovery services with explicit hypotheses, eligibility criteria, engagement measures, balancing measures, and a plan to learn rather than promise a guaranteed result.
A practical transition bundle may include medication reconciliation, plain-language education, functional and swallowing assessment when indicated, mental-health and cognitive screening, rehabilitation referral, primary-care connection, specialty follow-up, caregiver preparation, and a documented escalation route. The bundle should be tailored to the person and setting. It should not become a long checklist that is technically complete but unusable at home. A navigator can coordinate, but the navigator needs authority, caseload limits, clinical backup, and a method for escalating unresolved needs.
Decision-grade measurement
Measure the chain from concern to recovery
Campaign reach can support awareness, but it cannot demonstrate care reliability. Website visits, social impressions, posters distributed, and staff attendance describe activity. They do not show whether a concern was recognized, a response was completed, antibiotics were selected appropriately, a transfer was accepted, or a survivor received needed follow-up. Executives need a balanced measurement set that links process, outcome, equity, experience, and burden.
Start with a measure dictionary. Every metric should state the population, numerator, denominator, exclusions, unit, time origin, data source, accountable owner, review cadence, and known limitation. The organization should distinguish surveillance from bedside decision support and quality improvement from public reporting. It should also document version changes. A sepsis rate can change because the underlying condition changes, because documentation changes, or because the measurement definition changes.
Stratification should be planned before results are reviewed. Relevant dimensions may include care setting, site, transfer status, age group, language, race and ethnicity, rurality, disability, payer, discharge destination, and service line. The 2024 inequality review shows that associations vary by population and setting.12 Small cell sizes, data quality, privacy, and the risk of misinterpretation require governance. A disparity signal should trigger inquiry and partnership, not blame.
Use case review to complement aggregate data. A median time can improve while a small group experiences dangerous delays. An overall alert response rate can conceal one ward or shift with repeated failures. Leaders should review selected misses, delayed transfers, readmissions, deaths, complaints, and staff-reported near misses with a learning orientation. The purpose is to locate system conditions that can be changed.
Structured data table
A balanced executive sepsis measurement set
| Measure | Definition and denominator | Accountable owner | Review cadence | Equity or balancing check |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Concern-to-qualified-response time | Minutes from first documented concern to assessment by the locally designated qualified role, among eligible encounters. | Clinical operations | Weekly | Stratify by entry route, site, shift, language, age group, and transfer status. Documentation time may not equal onset time. |
| Alert acknowledgment and disposition | Eligible electronic alerts with acknowledgment and recorded disposition divided by all eligible alerts. | Clinical informatics | Weekly | Review burden, duplicate alerts, missed cases, overrides, and downstream actions. Do not equate acknowledgment with effective care. |
| Source-specific ordering support | Encounters meeting local eligibility criteria in which a source-specific pathway was used or a clinical reason for another approach was documented. | Pharmacy and stewardship | Monthly | Review resistance, adverse events, diagnostic uncertainty, culture quality, and adjustment after new information. |
| Transfer acceptance reliability | Transfers with named receiver, acceptance time, transport plan, and responsibility documented, divided by sepsis-related transfers. | Transfer center and site operations | Weekly | Stratify by rural site and destination. Track delay, cancellations, and clinical deterioration during wait. |
| Discharge readiness | Eligible survivors with documented understanding, medication reconciliation, functional needs, follow-up, and escalation plan, divided by eligible discharges. | Transition leadership | Monthly | Measure teach-back and usability, not checkbox presence. Review language, disability, caregiver, and destination needs. |
| Follow-up completion | Eligible survivors completing the locally defined follow-up contact within the specified period, divided by eligible survivors. | Navigator or ambulatory operations | Monthly | Track reach attempts, refusal, digital access, rural access, death, readmission, and reasons for noncompletion. |
| Patient and family concern response | Sampled concerns with documented acknowledgment, assessment, explanation, and disposition. | Patient experience and quality | Quarterly | Use qualitative review. Do not reduce experience to sentiment alone or infer clinical appropriateness from satisfaction. |
A focused implementation agenda
Use 90 days to create visibility and ownership
A 90-day agenda should not claim that the organization has solved sepsis. It should establish governance, define the pathway, expose high-risk gaps, and begin a disciplined test-and-learn cycle. The work should start with the settings where the greatest operational risk or inequity is already visible. A broad campaign across every site without readiness can spread attention too thin and make implementation quality difficult to evaluate.
During the first 30 days, name the executive sponsor and clinical co-leads. Confirm the populations and settings in scope. Map the current state from concern through recovery, including alerts, response roles, pharmacy, laboratory, transfer, discharge, and follow-up. Build the measure dictionary and identify where data are unavailable or unreliable. Review a sample of recent cases, including a delayed transfer, a readmission, an alert miss or false positive, and a patient or family concern. Document the approved hero, communication language, and campaign boundary so public awareness connects to a real service route.
By day 60, test the highest-priority workflow changes in one or two settings. That may include an alert escalation rule, a source-specific order pathway, a transfer acceptance standard, a discharge-readiness conversation, or a navigator follow-up protocol. Train the receiving roles, simulate failure scenarios, and monitor workload. The 2026 education study and the 2023 performance program show that learning and feedback work best when tied to operational practice rather than separated from it.317
By day 90, review the first balanced results with frontline teams, patients or survivors, and executive leadership. Examine not only whether the process moved faster but whether it remained appropriate, usable, and equitable. Decide what to sustain, modify, stop, or expand. Publish an internal improvement brief that states the population, period, definitions, results, limits, and next decision. Do not describe projected work as an achieved outcome.
Gantt-style implementation timeline
A proposed 30/60/90-day sepsis investment sequence
Leadership close
Make the investment visible in the route people experience
The 2026 theme asks leaders to invest in sepsis. For a hospital or health system, the strongest answer is not a one-day message. It is a visible operating commitment: listen to the patient and family, support qualified recognition, connect alerts to accountable response, align speed with stewardship, protect transfers, design recovery, and learn from inequity and failure.
Executives should expect evidence to remain nuanced. Some interventions improve process without demonstrating better patient outcomes. Some large trials produce a null primary result alongside a promising secondary finding. Some technologies work in one implementation and not another. Good governance does not hide that uncertainty. It uses it to define safer tests, stronger measures, and clearer decisions.
World Sepsis Day can become an annual checkpoint for whether the organization’s investments have produced a pathway that is easier to enter, harder to lose, and more accountable after discharge. The standard is not perfect prediction. The standard is a system that hears concern, mobilizes capable people, makes uncertainty visible, protects judgment, completes handoffs, and stays responsible for recovery.
Scholarly references
Peer-reviewed evidence
References are listed newest first by publication year. Findings are interpreted within each study’s population, design, setting, and limitations.
- Wymore, C., Santos León, E., Vakkalanka, P., Okoro, U., Harland, K. K., Fuller, B. M., Campbell, K., Swanson, M. B., Faine, B., Zepeski, A., Parker, E. A., Mack, L. J., Bell, A., DeJong, K., Mueller, K., Chrischilles, E., Carpenter, C. R., Wallace, K., Jones, M. P., … Mohr, N. M. (2026). The association between interhospital transfer and sepsis guideline adherence among rural emergency department patients. PLOS ONE, 21(7), e0351133. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0351133
- Derringer, J., Null, C., Heiles, J., Lusardi, K., Novack, A., & Dare, R. (2026). Evaluation of antibiotic selection in the emergency department following the implementation of an infectious source-specific order set. Journal of Pharmacy Practice, 39(4), 309-314. https://doi.org/10.1177/08971900251394123
- Castillo-Morales, L. M., Vega-Useche, C., & Devia Jaramillo, G. (2026). A standardized educational implementation strategy improves operational Code Sepsis knowledge in a high-complexity hospital in Colombia. Frontiers in Health Services, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.3389/frhs.2026.1907012
- Hou, S., Wei, L., Gong, Y., Tang, Q., Huang, Q., & Li, H. (2026). Readiness for hospital discharge and 30-day unplanned readmission in older adult sepsis survivors from internal medicine wards: A cross-sectional study. Patient Preference and Adherence, 20, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.2147/PPA.S607664
- Rhee, C., Balamuth, F., Dysart, K., Miller, E., Li, Z., Huang, J., Gunturi, D., Ostapenko, S., Jin, R., DelloStritto, L., Guy, J., Poland, R., Sands, K., Bennett, T. D., Scott, H. F., Alpern, E. R., Sanchez-Pinto, L. N., Russell, S., DeWitt, P. E., … Weiss, S. L. (2026). National estimates of pediatric sepsis in US hospitals using clinical data. JAMA, 335(15), 1321-1331. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2026.3100
- Honeyford, K., Cooke, G., Kinderler, A., Welch, J., Brent, A., Glampson, B., Tonkin-Crine, S., Lazzarino, R., Patil, S., Ghazal, P., Goodman, P., Daniels, R., Gordon, A., & Costelloe, C. (2026). Digital alerting to improve sepsis detection and patient outcomes in NHS trusts: A multi-methods study. Health and Social Care Delivery Research, 14(5), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.3310/GJCC0605
- Mugada, V. K., Saragadam, G. R. P., Rajana, A., & Arikitamula, R. (2026). Evaluating adherence to the 2021 Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines for sepsis and septic shock management in intensive care units: A prospective observational study. Prague Medical Report, 127(2), 81-88. https://doi.org/10.14712/23362936.2026.12
- Taylor, S. P., Eaton, T., Rios, A., Boyd, D., Tapp, H., McWilliams, A., Chou, S.-H., Halpern, S., Angus, D. C., McCurdy, L., Ganesan, A., Nguyen, H., Connor, C. D., & Kowalkowski, M. (2025). Proactive telehealth-based sepsis transition and recovery support, hospital readmission, and mortality: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Internal Medicine, 185(10), 1238-1246. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.3699
- Ein Alshaeba, S., Marhoffer, E. A., Holleck, J. L., Theisen-Toupal, J., Grimshaw, A. A., & Gunderson, C. G. (2025). The effect of early warning systems for sepsis on mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 40(14), 3463-3468. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-025-09569-5
- Bircak-Kuchtova, B., Rose, N., Geis, C., Finke, K., Pletz, M. W., Chung, H.-Y., & Fleischmann-Struzek, C. (2025). Effectiveness of targeted post-acute interventions and follow-up services for sepsis survivors: A systematic review. Critical Care, 29(1), 351. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-025-05585-3
- Ruhnke, T., Storch, J., Freytag, A., Rose, N., Kimmig, A., Dröge, P., Wedekind, L., Günster, C., Goldhahn, L., Swart, E., Pletz, M. W., Reinhart, K., Schlattmann, P., & Fleischmann-Struzek, C. (2025). Transitional care after hospitalization for sepsis in Germany: Results from the population-based AVENIR cohort study. Infection, 53(6), 2533-2542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s15010-025-02589-7
- Bladon, S., Ashiru-Oredope, D., Cunningham, N., Pate, A., Martin, G. P., Zhong, X., Gilham, E. L., Brown, C. S., Mirfenderesky, M., Palin, V., & van Staa, T. P. (2024). Rapid systematic review on risks and outcomes of sepsis: The influence of risk factors associated with health inequalities. International Journal for Equity in Health, 23(1), 34. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-024-02114-6
- Mormer, E., Terhorst, L., Coyle, J., & Freburger, J. (2024). Racial and ethnic disparities in speech-language pathology utilization for patients with oropharyngeal dysphagia in acute care. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 33(5), 2599-2609. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_AJSLP-24-00024
- Hartley, P., Pelkmans, J., Lott, C., Higgins, M. K., Chen, X., Reinhardt, A., Zhang, Y., & Wood, K. A. (2024). Readmissions in sepsis survivors: Discharge setting risks. American Journal of Critical Care, 33(5), 353-363. https://doi.org/10.4037/ajcc2024947
- Richardson, K. J., Mullen, C. L., Sacha, G. L., & Wasowski, E. M. (2024). Outcomes of hospitalized patients with sepsis before and after implementation of a sepsis care improvement initiative at a community hospital. Journal of Pharmacy Technology, 40(6), 263-268. https://doi.org/10.1177/87551225241283193
- Olander, A., Andersson, H., Sundler, A. J., Hagiwara, M. A., & Bremer, A. (2023). The onset of sepsis as experienced by patients and family members: A qualitative interview study. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 32(19-20), 7402-7411. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.16785
- Schinkel, M., Holleman, F., Vleghels, R., Brugman, K., Ridderikhof, M. L., Dzelili, M., Nanayakkara, P. W. B., & Wiersinga, W. J. (2023). The impact of a sepsis performance improvement program in the emergency department: A before-after intervention study. Infection, 51(4), 945-954. https://doi.org/10.1007/s15010-022-01957-x