Implementation of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines

Abstract

Guidelines are available and used in almost all walks of life to direct and advise, whether it be on how to design the most effective and visually attractive website or which route to take when travelling from A to B. Medicine is no different, and guidelines, published by official representative bodies or groups of opinion leaders, abound. Intensive care medicine has been relatively slow to jump on the guideline ‘bandwagon’ partly, as we will see later, because of the lack of convincing evidence on which to base such recommendations. However, guidelines are now widely availableon subjects as diverse as nutritional support [1], weaning from mechanical ventilation [2], and end-of-life decision making and care [3]. Research in intensive care medicinemoves at an incredibly fast pace, and with the ever increasingnumber of’ specialist’ journals and widespread access to the web facilitating rapid dispersion of new results and publications, intensivists are bombarded almost daily with information about a potentially valuable new technique or therapy or a previously unknown risk of an old, well-accepted treatment. The difficulty lies in assimilating all this new ‘knowledge’ and determining exactly how and when it should be applied to patients. This is where guidelines come into their own, by providing a clear and complete analysis of all the available data and summarising the evidence in order to provide clear directions as to how each patient in that situation should be managed. Guidelines ensure that, if followed, patients will be treated according to the very latest standard of care.