McKesson Clinical Connection™ Talks: Sepsis

October 16, 2020

Sepsis is one of the leading causes of hospital readmissions. Our clinical resource team discusses strategies and tools to help prevent, diagnose and treat sepsis.

Speakers:

Patti Baicy, Director, Clinical Resource Team, McKesson Medical-Surgical
Patricia Howell, Clinical Support Manager, McKesson Medical-Surgical

Full transcript:

[Patti] Welcome to McKesson Clinical Connection Talks. I'm Patti Baicy, and today I talk with Pat Howell about how to reduce hospital readmissions due to sepsis. ♪ [music] ♪ I want to thank you for joining me here today. So Pat, can you review some of the presenting symptoms of sepsis?

[Patricia] One of the things I would like to mention is the 100/100/100 rule: a heart rate above 100, a temperature above 100, or their blood pressure below 100. And one of the tools that nurses can use and the residents or patients themselves is the Stop and Watch tool from INTERACT.

Things were looking great yesterday, today they're changing, so we need to stop and watch, put this person on our watch list.

What are some of the clinical recommendations to prevent, diagnose, and treat?

Prevent infections from happening to begin with. If we can have vaccinations in place for patients and staff members, recognizing when someone's illness is getting worse so that it doesn't exacerbate and become a full-blown infection. One of the primary things that people forget about is hand washing.

And then for diagnosing, making sure that staff are comfortable with the tools that they have in place, using point-of-care testing for lab work, having good vital sign equipment, and then for treatment, not all facilities are at the same level for treating their patients.

We have facility assessment tools available on our Quality One program. They have to make sure that they are assessing their staff properly, making sure the staff know what they're doing so they can either treat in place or recognize the problem quickly, and sending them out quickly so that they don't get septic shock.

I really would like to discuss a program that you all have developed with our customers for how they can reduce avoidable hospital readmissions.

There are a couple things that I would recommend, Patti. One is to have a champion in place to lead the program. Education is very important, and to have protocols in place as well. It's really important for sepsis, especially, to be able to recognize the signs and symptoms of sepsis and early recognition to prevent hospital readmissions.

What are some of the tools that we have in place for staff training?

One that I'm really excited about is our UPrevent website. And on UPrevent, we have webinars archived, we have infection prevention webinars on there from our vendor partners. And on McKesson Academy, we have a variety of infection prevention topics. We have OSHA training on there for blood-borne pathogens.

We have Pro-on-the-Go. They're little snippets for nurses that are out in the field to educate themselves on something really quickly. And then the other is a readmission interactive video that we have on there for nurses to make sure that they're competent at the levels that they should be.

What are some of the benefits that you think for our customers and where can they find these benefits?

Some of the benefits are our clinical resource team that we have a variety of nurses with different backgrounds that we can tap into. One of the other benefits is the educational support that we've built into the program, both as an electronic guide and as a paper pocket guide.

Well, I appreciate all the work that you all have put into this program. And thank you for joining me today. ♪ [music] ♪