PHOENIX: A Better Way To Look At Peds Sepsis

EM Pulse Podcast™

If you practice in emergency medicine you probably live on the look out for sepsis. You likely follow the 2016 Sepsis-3 guidelines for adults which really was a paradigm shift from an infection-associated SIRS, to infection-associated organ dysfunction with the SOFA score or sequential organ failure assessment score of at least 2 points in patients with suspected infection. However, the definition of sepsis in kids was not updated at that time in part because SOFA was not studied in children. That means that our current pediatric guidelines are from 2005! Good news though! The Phoenix sepsis criteria for sepsis and septic shock in children were derived and validated by the international SCCM Pediatric Sepsis Definition Task Force and we interviewed two of the task force members to help us operationalize it on our podcast.

Connect with us on social media @empulsepodcast or at ucdavisem.com

Host:

Dr. Julia Magaña, Associate Professor of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at UC Davis

Guests:

Dr. Halden Scott, Associate Professor of pediatrics a the university of Colorado and pediatric emergency physician at the children’s hospital Colorado

Dr. Fran Balamuth, Associate professor of pediatrics at Perlman school of medicine at the university of Pennsylvania, attending physician in the ED at CHOP, co-director of the pediatric sepsis program at CHOP

Resources:

The Phoenix sepsis criteria for sepsis and septic shock in children. Schlapbach LJ, Watson RS, Sorce LR, Argent AC, Menon K, Hall MW, Akech S, Albers DJ, Alpern ER, Balamuth F, Bembea M, Biban P, Carrol ED, Chiotos K, Chisti MJ, DeWitt PE, Evans I, Flauzino de Oliveira C, Horvat CM, Inwald D, Ishimine P, Jaramillo-Bustamante JC, Levin M, Lodha R, Martin B, Nadel S, Nakagawa S, Peters MJ, Randolph AG, Ranjit S, Rebull MN, Russell S, Scott HF, de Souza DC, Tissieres P, Weiss SL, Wiens MO, Wynn JL, Kissoon N, Zimmerman JJ, Sanchez-Pinto LN, Bennett TD; Society of Critical Care Medicine Pediatric Sepsis Definition Task Force. International Consensus Criteria for Pediatric Sepsis and Septic Shock. JAMA. 2024 Feb 27;331(8):665-674. doi: 10.1001/jama.2024.0179. PMID: 38245889; PMCID: PMC10900966.

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Thank you to the UC Davis Department of Emergency Medicine for supporting this podcast and to Orlando Magaña at OM Productions for audio production services.