Introduction: Sepsis is one of the most common reasons of patient’s death during the intensive care unit stay. It is often an overlooked condition while the prognosis of the patient worsens every hour. Using the different screening tools it is widely appropriate to recognize sign and symptoms of sepsis as early as possible. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to find out the incidence of sepsis in intensive care units, to explore different screening tools which can be used for early recognition of sepsis and to define the role of the nurses while taking care of septic patient. Methods: A descriptive method was carried out using Slovenian and foreign literature throughtout the digital library data from Ljubljana University library (DiKUL), worldwide online basis CINAHL, Medline and COBIB.SI. The following words for literature searching were used: sepsis OR SIRS, incidence and incidence of sepsis, signs AND simptoms, nursing, screening tools, protocols OR guidelines, management AND treatment, early recognition OR detection of sepsis. At the end, 15 different studies were used for analysis. Results: The incidence of sepsis in critically ill patients in intensive care units is pretty high and ranges from 3,6 to 37,4 %. High incidence of sepsis is also found to be a major problem in pre-hospital environment and at the emergency departments. Different hospitals use different screening tools. Surviving Sepsis Campaign, recommends the use of Quick Sepsis−Related Organ Failure Assessment and Sepsis−Related Organ Failure Assessment. Discussion and conclusion: It can be noticed that discordant use of words like sepsis, severe sepsis and septic shock, is still being present in the literature. There are also phrases like septicaemia and sepsis syndrome that are still used in literature but are not suitable anymore. The incidence of sepsis differs because there are different system and definitions being used for defining septic patients. Nurses play an important role for recognizing onset of early sign and symptoms of sepsis and have crucial part while taking care of a septic patient. There is a need to rewrite new definitions for sepsis and septic shock in Slovenian medicine and nursing literature. Protocols for taking care of septic patients must also be updated as soon as possible. It would be useful to investigate the incidence of sepsis in Slovenian intensive care units. It is very important for nurses to be properly educated about it and how to take care of a septic patient. Better knowledge of sepsis among nurses will benefit in the better outcome of a septic patient.
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