Hi everyone, this is Steve Carroll, and this is the Amb Basic Podcast, with a mini episode on

Sepsis definitions. Today I just published the Sepsis Update, Sepsis 3.0, if you will. There are

lots of changes with the new Sepsis guidelines, so that episode reviews them all. One of the changes

is that we now have eliminated the classification of severe sepsis.

My view, which some may or may not agree with, is that the new guidelines also rely a lot more

in clinician judgment to recognize sepsis without specifically spelling out how to recognize it.

I think the old guidelines actually had a good framework on how to recognize septic patients

with a progression from

SERS to sepsis to severe sepsis to septic shock. In addition, a lot of our current

sepsis screening tools are based on SIRS criteria, so even though SERS can be very nonspecific

for sick patients, I think it's the first step in recognizing possible sepsis.

In order to help learners understand how to recognize sepsis, I've re-published a section

from the first sepsis podcast I did all the way back in February 2012.

This section only talks about how to recognize sepsis using the SERS criteria and the

stepwise progression from SERS all the way up

to septic shock. To be clear, I'm certainly not saying that our patients follow this stepwise

progression, just that's a convenient way to teach how to recognize sepsis. Maybe you'll find this

useful, maybe not. I'll let you be the judge of that. So here's the republication of the old sepsis

guidelines on how to recognize sepsis. So to start things off, first we have to talk about a few

definitions and what they mean. I'm sure that we all have heard of the source criteria in the term

sepsis and septic shock. Let's go through these terms and talk about how they fit into the big

picture. The first thing to talk about how they fin to the big picture.

...