The Effect of Nurse Champions on Compliance With Keystone Intensive Care Unit Sepsis-Screening Protocol

Sepsis poses a major threat to patient safety in intensive care units (ICU) across the country. An accumulating body of evidence supports using established protocols to screen ICU patients regularly for sepsis indicators; however, there often is a gap between what is known and what is practiced. Compliance with sepsis screening was noted to be less than acceptable at one Regional Michigan Medical Center. The 2-fold purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of introducing nurse champions into an ICU environment on (1) ICU nurses' compliance with Michigan Health and Hospital Association Keystone ICU sepsis screening protocols and (2) patient safety outcomes. A 1-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was used for the study. A nonprobability, convenience sample of patient charts from a 16-bed ICU in a 352-bed regional referral center was used for the study. Findings from this study demonstrated that the introduction of nurse champions significantly improved compliance with ICU sepsis screening, from 23% preintroduction to 74% postintroduction, but had virtually no effect on patient outcomes related to percentage of patients treated for sepsis.