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Global Sepsis Alliance

GSA

Provide global leadership to reduce the worldwide burden of sepsis.

Lobbying Activity

Meeting with Annukka Ojala (Cabinet of Commissioner Stella Kyriakides), Roberto Reig Rodrigo (Cabinet of Commissioner Stella Kyriakides)

4 May 2022 · Sepsis

Response to Recommendation for strengthened actions against antimicrobial resistance

23 Mar 2022

The growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major challenge in the treatment of sepsis. As more pathogens become resistant to available antibiotics, more people are at risk of developing sepsis from bacterial infections, and fewer opportunities exist for successful treatment. Without curbing AMR, ensuring that clinicians can recognize the signs of sepsis, and sharing treatment best practices quickly, the global sepsis burden will grow. Timely and targeted antimicrobial stewardship in the context of appropriate urgent therapy represents the cornerstone of effective sepsis treatment. Adult patients who receive antimicrobials within three hours of sepsis recognition have increased chances of survival. Similarly, in children with sepsis and septic shock, several cohorts report substantially better outcomes in those who receive timely intravenous antibiotics. The Surviving Sepsis Campaign recommends initiating sepsis treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics covering the main likely pathogens, followed by narrowing to targeted therapy if a pathogen or source is identified, and stopping antimicrobial therapy if bacterial or fungal infection is felt unlikely to be the cause. Considering this strong link, AMR strategies must be developed in parallel with sepsis management plans and should include the monitoring and follow-up of infection development and treatment. Sepsis monitoring can be a useful indicator of successful antibiotic stewardship strategies. In order to enable sepsis monitoring, national health systems need to enhance the mechanisms they use to diagnose infection and recognise sepsis. Consequently, this should also translate into more accurate death certification, to give a clearer picture of infection mortality. A proper use of ICD-11 coding system would help measure the efficacy of treatments. A greater role should be played by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in coordinating member states’ monitoring and data collection and in establishing a common minimum data set. Such a data set should be applicable to neonatal, paediatric, and adult patients to capture the true burden. In this framework, the interoperability of existing national or regional datasets should be facilitated to better understand the epidemiology of sepsis and its links with antimicrobial resistance. Better understanding, improved monitoring, detection and treatment of sepsis across all age groups would bring invaluable benefits to European citizens, European health systems and the economy at large. Sepsis should be considered by ECDC as one of the “special health issues” mentioned in the agreed text of its recently extended mandate, such as AMR and healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), because of its close interlink with these public health issues and with communicable diseases. AMR will hamper successful sepsis treatment. At the same time, effective quality improvement initiatives targeting recognition and treatment of sepsis need to go hand in hand with antimicrobial stewardship initiatives, and HAI prevention initiatives – in fact, these three priorities share substantial overlap which should be used to create synergisms. Best practice: Screening and speeding up delivery of the right antibiotics In England’s NHS from 2016 to 2019 hospitals were incentivized to prioritize patients with sepsis, including measurement of the rates of screening for sepsis and the rates of delivery of rapid antibiotics (within 1 hour) for patients suspected to have sepsis. Not only did screening improve markedly, but also rates of rapid antibiotic delivery improved steadily from a baseline of 32% of patients in 2016 to more than 80% in April 2019, with most antibiotic prescriptions starting in EDs. However, total hospital consumption of antibiotics remained unchanged – it is compatible to incentivize rapid treatment of sepsis without adverse consequence on hospital antibiotic usage.
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Meeting with Anne Bucher (Director-General Health and Food Safety)

27 Jun 2019 · Findings on sepsis in Global Burden of Disease Report; Latest knowledge about sepsis occurrence in Europe; WHO approach to patient safety; Ideas around EU value added on sepsis

Meeting with Vytenis Andriukaitis (Commissioner) and

20 Mar 2018 · Increasing awareness and fostering the prevention and the quality of infection and sepsis management

Meeting with Vytenis Andriukaitis (Commissioner)

7 Dec 2017 · Healthcare associated infections; AMR