Knowledge of nurses and physicians of the intensive care unit about sepsis

Sepsis can be defined by the presence of a life-threatening organic dysfunction secondary to the host's unregulated response to infection. This article aims to analyze the knowledge of nurses and physicians of the intensive care unit about sepsis. This is a descriptive study with a quantitative approach, carried out with seven nurses and five physicians of an adult intensive care unit. It was evidenced in the study the predominance of male professionals, aged between 25 and 35 years, who only had the undergraduate course. It was also noted that most of the interviewees were out of date on the new classification of sepsis and that simple prevention actions were cited by less than half of these professionals. For a long time there have been difficulties in characterizing a patient with severe infection. Septicemia, generalized infection or septic syndrome made it difficult to evaluate the efficacy of treatments because they were constantly confused or not clearly specified. From the results obtained, this study concluded that nurses and physicians had superficial knowledge about the new definitions of sepsis, its clinical manifestations and the preventive measures for it.