https://doi.org/10.4081/ecj.2026.15529
Early identification and prediction of adverse outcomes in emergency sepsis: a mini review
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Published: 21 September 2026
Sepsis is a systemic disease process and is the leading cause of death globally. Early identification of septic patients is crucial to initiate timely treatment and improve survival chances. The nurse has a central role in this process, using severity scores to identify patients at risk early and predict adverse outcomes. This mini review aims to identify severity scores that can be used by nurses in the context of sepsis in emergencies and compare them to identify the most appropriate tools for early identification and prediction of adverse outcomes, such as mortality (primary outcome) and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admission (secondary outcome). The search was conducted between April and June 2024 in PubMed (MEDLINE), Web of Science, Scopus and the Cochrane Library, selecting articles published within the last 5 years, limited to systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The PICOM method was used for processing the search string. The SIRS criteria appeared to be useful for early identification. The qSOFA and NEWS showed consistent prognostic performance for mortality prediction, while NEWS showed promising results for predicting ICU admission. SOFA and UVA also showed good performance. The literature highlights several scores applicable by the nurse in emergency sepsis. Further studies are needed to confirm the effectiveness of the UVA score and to evaluate its routine adoption. The results made it possible to propose an update of the sepsis protocol of the ASL Toscana Sud-Est in Italy.
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