Abstract
Sepsis affected more than 48.9 million people and claimed more than 11 million lives worldwide in 2017 (Rudd et. al, 2020). Delayed antibiotic administration in septic patients can lead to significant mortality. Nurses have the opportunity to begin providing care to septic patients before they have been examined by a provider through the use of nurse-initiated order sets. The purpose of this project was to improve antibiotic administration in septic patients using nurse-initiated order sets in the emergency department (ED).|This quality improvement project consisted of sepsis education to 46 full time staff nurses in the ED of a level I trauma academic medical center. Patients were identified using a retrospective chart review of patients admitted with a diagnosis of sepsis. 63 were selected to be in the pre-intervention and 58 post intervention cohorts.|Outcomes measured included door to antibiotic administration time and compliance with nurse-initiated order sets. Pearson X2 tests were used in the analysis of antibiotic administration time and nurse-initiated sepsis order compliance. Frequency of nurse-initiated order set use increased from 3% in the preintervention cohort to 10% in the post intervention cohort. There was no statically significant change in door to antibiotic administration times between the two cohorts. Despite the lack of statistically significant results found in this study, the usage of the nurse-initiated sepsis order set did increase. This shows that educational intervention was successful and if this progress continues it could be significant in the future.|Keywords: sepsis, antibiotic, nurse-initiated, emergency department