A Multi-Hospital Survey of Current Practices for Supporting Recovery From Sepsis.

Sepsis survivors are at increased risk for morbidity and functional impairment. There are recommended practices to support recovery after sepsis, but it is unclear how often they are implemented. We sought to assess the current use of recovery-based practices across hospitals.

designElectronic survey assessing the use of best practices for recovery from COVID-related and non-COVID-related sepsis. Questions included four-point Likert responses of "never" to "always/nearly always."

settingTwenty-six veterans affairs hospitals with the highest ( SUBJECTS: Inpatient and outpatient clinician leaders.

interventionsNone. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN

resultsFor each domain, we calculated the proportion of "always/nearly always" responses and mean Likert scores. We assessed for differences by hospital survival, COVID versus non-COVID sepsis, and sepsis case volume. Across eight domains of care, the proportion "always/nearly always" responses ranged from: 80.7% (social support) and 69.8% (medication management) to 22.5% (physical recovery and adaptation) and 0.0% (emotional support). Higher-survival hospitals more often performed screening for new symptoms/limitations (49.2% vs 35.1% "always/nearly always,"

conclusionsOur findings show variable adoption of practices for sepsis recovery. Future work is needed to understand why some practice domains are employed more frequently than others, and how to facilitate practice implementation, particularly within rarely adopted domains such as emotional support.