• Lise Skovgaard Svingel, Merete Storgaard, Buket Öztürk Esen, Lotte Ebdrup, Jette Ahrensberg, Kim M Larsen, Mette Nørgaard, Henrik Toft Sørensen, and Christian Fynbo Christiansen.
• Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark lisskg@clin.au.dk.
• Emerg Med J. 2022 Sep 1; 39 (9): 697-700.

BackgroundThe clinical benefit of implementing the quick Sepsis-related Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) instead of early warning scores (EWS) to screen all hospitalised patients for critical illness has yet to be investigated in a large, multicentre study.MethodsWe conducted a cohort study including all hospitalised patients ≥18 years with EWS recorded at hospitals in the Central Denmark Region during the year 2016. The primary outcome was intensive care unit (ICU) admission and/or death within 2 days following an initial EWS. Prognostic accuracy was examined using sensitivity, specificity, negative predictive value (NPV) and positive predictive value (PPV). Discriminative accuracy was examined by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC).ResultsAmong 97 332 evaluated patients, 1714 (1.8%) experienced the primary outcome. The qSOFA ≥2 was less sensitive (11.7% (95% CI: 10.2% to 13.3%) vs 25.1% (95% CI: 23.1% to 27.3%)) and more specific (99.3% (95% CI: 99.2% to 99.3%) vs 97.5% (95% CI: 97.4% to 97.6%)) than EWS ≥5. The NPV was similar for the two scores (EWS ≥5, 98.6% (95% CI: 98.6% to 98.7%) and qSOFA ≥2, 98.4% (95% CI: 98.3% to 98.5%)), while the PPV was 15.1% (95% CI: 13.8% to 16.5%) for EWS ≥5 and 22.4% (95% CI: 19.7% to 25.3%) for qSOFA ≥2. The AUROC was 0.72 (95% CI: 0.70 to 0.73) for EWS and 0.66 (95% CI: 0.65 to 0.67) for qSOFA.ConclusionThe qSOFA was less sensitive (qSOFA ≥2 vs EWS ≥5) and discriminatively accurate than the EWS for predicting ICU admission and/or death within 2 days after an initial EWS. This study did not support replacing EWS with qSOFA in all hospitalised patients.© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.

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