Dr. Michael Pulia was interviewed by The Lancet Infectious Diseases regarding his perspectives on the 2021 Surviving Sepsis Campaign update. Updated global adult sepsis guidelines, released in October 2021 by the Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC), place an increased emphasis on improving the care of sepsis patients after they are discharged from the intensive care unit (ICU) and represent greater geographic and gender diversity than previous versions.
The new guidelines specially address challenges to treating patients experiencing the long-term effects of sepsis are also addressed in the guidelines. Patients often have lengthy ICU stays and then face a long and complicated road to recovery. In addition to physical rehabilitation challenges, patients and their families often are uncertain how to coordinate care that promotes recovery and matches their goals of care.
To address these issues, the guidelines recommend involving patients and their families in goals-of-care discussions and hospital discharge plans, which should include early and ongoing follow-up with clinicians to support and manage long-term effects and assessment of physical, cognitive, and emotional issues after discharge.
“The most important update, from my perspective as a stewardship researcher, is the introduction of nuance into the antibiotic timing and spectrum recommendations. The one size fits all, 1 h target for antibiotics has been replaced with a tiered approach that acknowledges both severity of illness (shock present or absent) and likelihood of sepsis as determined by the clinician,” said Dr. Pulia.
The Lancet Infectious Diseases was launched in 2001 and is a lively monthly journal of original research, review, opinion, and news covering international issues relevant to clinical infectious diseases specialists worldwide. It is an internationally trusted source of clinical, public health, and global health knowledge and considered the world-leading infectious diseases journal.
Dr. Michael Pulia is a tenure track, Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency at the University of Wisconsin (UW) Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Pulia’s Emergency Care for Infectious Diseases (EC-ID) research program focuses on improving the management of infectious diseases in the emergency department, with an emphasis on systems engineering guided interventions. Dr. Pulia has over 40 peer reviewed publications, including top tier medical journals such as Pediatrics, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Annals of Emergency Medicine and the New England Journal of Medicine, and he is a nationally recognized expert in the management of resistant bacterial infections, sepsis, skin infections, pneumonia, urinary tract infections and COVID-19.