## Sepsis: Early Recognition Sepsis is one of the most time-critical emergencies encountered in Canadian nursing practice. Defined by the Sepsis-3 consensus (2016) as life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection, sepsis kills more Canadians annually than prostate cancer, breast cancer, and HIV combined. The Canadian Institute for Health Information estimates over 30,000 Canadians die from sepsis each year — and the majority of preventable deaths share a single common factor: delayed recognition. ### Sepsis-3 Definition Under the current Sepsis-3 framework, organ dysfunction is operationally defined as an acute increase in the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score of ≥2 points from baseline in a patient with a known or suspected infection. This shift away from the older SIRS criteria (which required only 2 of: fever, tachycardia, tachypnea, or leukocytosis) was deliberately chosen because SIRS lacks specificity — it triggers on pancreatitis, burns, and trauma as readily as infection — and because it does not predict outcomes as reliably as SOFA-based organ dysfunction. Septic shock — the most severe subtype — is defined as sepsis plus:...