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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Alison Bray, Dr Emma KampourakiORCiD, Amanda Winter, Dr Peter Messer, Dr Sara Graziadio
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. It is recommended that developers of Point Of Care Tests (POCTs) assess the care pathway of the patient population of interest in order to understand if the POCT fits within the pathway and has the potential to improve it. If the variation of the pathway across potential hospitals is large, then it is likely that the evaluation of effectiveness is harder and the route towards large-scale takes adoption longer. Evaluating care pathways can be a time-consuming activity when conducted through clinical audits or interviews with healthcare professionals. We have developed a more rapid methodology which extrapolates the care pathway from local hospital guidelines and assesses their variation. Sepsis kills 46,000 people per year in the UK with societal costs of up to £10 billion. Therefore, there is a clinical need for an optimized pathway. By applying our method in this field, we were able to assess the variation in current hospital guidelines for sepsis and infer the potential impact this may have on the evidence development on innovations in this applications. We obtained 15 local sepsis guidelines. Two independent reviewers extracted: use of the national early warning score (NEWS), signs and risk factors informing the decision to prescribe antibiotics, and the number of decisional steps up to this point. Considerable variation was observed in all the variables, which is likely to have an impact on future clinical and economic evaluations and adoption of POCT for the identification of patients with sepsis.
Author(s): Bray A, Kampouraki E, Winter A, Jesuthasan A, Messer B, Graziadio S
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Year: 2020
Volume: 17
Issue: 6
Online publication date: 19/03/2020
Acceptance date: 14/03/2020
Date deposited: 06/04/2020
ISSN (print): 1661-7827
ISSN (electronic): 1660-4601
Publisher: MDPI AG
URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17062026
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph17062026
PubMed id: 32204395
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