Commentary The Surviving Sepsis Campaign sepsis change bundles and clinical practice

The Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC) is an international effort to reduce mortality in severe sepsis and septic shock. The campaign included the creation of evidence-based guidelines sponsored and endorsed by 11 international organizations. From these guidelines, sepsis change bundles for initial resuscitation (6 hours) and management (24 hours) were created as a performance improvement tool. In this issue of Critical Care, Gao et al. have evaluated performance at their institution by using a close adaptation of the two SSC bundle sets and demonstrated an association between 100 % compliance with the bundle elements and clinical outcome. The next step will be to demonstrate that the use of education and feedback for performance improvement will increase compliance and decrease mortality in the patient population in general. As members of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC), we are pleased to comment on the study by Gao et al. published in this issue of Critical Care [1]. Protocolized care now exists for a heart attack or a stroke, based on advances detailed in the medical literature. Until now there has been no attempt to reproduce such an approach in severe sepsis despite recently published studies that have shown decreased mortality and morbidity as a result of interventions applied to patients with severe sepsis [2-6]. The SSC (www.survivingsepsis.org) hopes to change that. The campaign is administered by the Society of Critical Care