Information found in this blog is based on an article from Health Affairs, where an emergency physician describes his mother’s fight against neutropenic sepsis contracted after her second bout against cancer.
In this case, the sepsis killed the patient, impacting the patient safety goal. Additionally, the delay in treatment – even if it did not result in the patient’s death – is an impact to the patient services goal. With delayed patient services, there is the potential for a lawsuit, or other potential action against the hospital. We’ll consider this an impact to both the compliance and organizational goal. We can visually diagram the causes that led to these impacted goals in a Cause Map, or visual root cause analysis.
Here, the patient death was due to her inability to fight neutropenic sepsis, which resulted from a systemic infection that the body – having depleted infection-fighting cells during recent chemotherapy – was unable to fight off. Medical intervention can improve the survival rate, especially when life-saving measures are begun quickly and followed completely. In this case, the patient was hospitalized for 23 hours before sepsis protocol was begun.
The patient’s primary doctor was her oncologist, who did not consult with an intensive care doctor. Despite recommendations to have care of new ICU patients fall within the responsibility of an intensive-care doctor, this solution was not implemented at this particular hospital due to “political barriers”. It can thus be surmised that this may have been a cause to the delay in consultation during the case as well.
The sepsis protocol was begun only when care was transferred to the intensive-care doctor as a result of the patient’s son requesting transfer to a different hospital. Perhaps the staff was unaware of the seriousness of the situation, as the monitoring of the patient appeared inadequate. The transfer of the patient to the ICU was also only done at the specific request of the patient’s son. Based on the description of the experience at the hospital, it’s not clear why the patient’s doctor did not order the standard sepsis protocol.
The hospital involved in the case has updated its guidelines in treating sepsis. Hopefully this will successfully result in the reduction of cases such as this one.
To view the Outline, Cause Map, Timeline, and Solutions, please click “Download PDF” above. Or click here to read more.