One of the two 2020 Erin’s Campaign for Kids Nursing Awards in the category of Pediatric Nurse is awarded to Nicole Magers, BSN, RN, a Clinical Educator and Critical Care Staff Nurse at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Critical Care Transport Team. As part of her role, Magers works to increase rapid recognition of sepsis and reduce mortality by minimizing the time to antibiotic administration in all neonate and pediatric patients.
Along with her physician partner, Magers developed three separate sepsis guidelines to distribute to their referral hospitals, based on surviving sepsis guidelines. They developed one to screen pre-term neonates, one for term neonates up to 28 days of life, and one for pediatric patients. The guidelines identify signs and symptoms with an algorithm for the referring facility to follow once a differential of sepsis is identified with the sole purpose of reducing time to antibiotic administration.
The Critical Care Transport Team was then trained to use the algorithms and treatment guidelines via didactic lectures, high-fidelity patient simulations, and competency validation through care study testing. “Once the training and distribution was complete, we began to collect data to evaluate the effectiveness of the guidelines in reducing the time to antibiotics,” said Magers.
Her work is showing strong results. The data collected from January 2017 through June 2019 from the neonate population showed that there was a 36.4% reduction in time to antibiotics for patients diagnosed with sepsis at discharge compared to the time period before the implementation of these guidelines.
“I am incredibly proud to continue the legacy created by this amazing organization and to continue to honor the memory of Erin by furthering the knowledge of sepsis and its management in rural hospitals. The hope is that sepsis awareness can continue to grow and will reduce the number of preventable deaths.”
