Grant: Network Catalyst - Infection and Immunity (III)

Care for critically ill patients consumes over 10% of the health care budget across Canada. Severe infection (sepsis) is the most common diagnosis in critical care wards, and has by far the highest mortality rate of any acute disease. Once infection causes organ dysfunction, nearly half of patients succumb to their disease. While the media focuses on sporadic high impact events like SARS and H1N1, community-acquired severe infections due to common bacterial and viral pathogens result in a greater numbers of deaths by orders of magnitude. Despite basic scientific advances in the understanding of sepsis, translation of this knowledge into clinical practice has not occurred effectively so that the high mortality rate of sepsis has not changed over the past two decades. Accordingly, we propose to create the Sepsis Outcomes National Registry to Improve Survival as an essential vehicle to translate basic scientific knowledge into improved patient outcomes.