Use of the Quick Sequential Organ Failure Assessment Tool for Sepsis Screening

Sepsis is a clinical condition that requires early identification and initiation of evidence-based interventions to improve mortality and outcomes. A quality concern that has been identified is that the emergency department at the practice site is not actively screening for sepsis patients. This has resulted in difficulty meeting three-and six-hour sepsis bundle metrics. The purpose of this quality improvement project is to implement a sepsis screening methodology to correct this gap in practice. The door to lactic acid collection metric will be used to determine if any statistical improvement was made after the implementation of a sepsis screening tool. The screening tool selected for the project will be the qSOFA tool as this is one of the easiest tools to use and implement. The quality improvement project used a quantitative methodology with quasi-experimental design. The results demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in the collection times of lactic acid post-implementation. The results further support the use of sepsis screening in the emergency department setting for rapid identification and treatment of sepsis conditions. Emergency nursing plays a pivotal role in the identification and treatment of this condition as nurses are often the first healthcare professional a septic patient will encounter.