• sepsis
• mangement
• detection

As part of the development of new sepsis guidelines in response to the national Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) and new National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines on sepsis in Paediatrics, we undertook a retrospective audit comparing the new guidelines to previous cases that had attended the emergency department (ED). NICE guidelines indicate that screening is necessary to detect sepsis but it gives no suggestion on how to differentiate septic children from children who have an infection. The new NICE guideline indicates that having one risk factor should trigger sepsis screening but we felt that this would over treat and potentially cause harm and trigger unnecessary investigations.

We looked at all children who …