“Sepsis brought him to his knees”: exploring the lived experiences and perspectives of sepsis survivors and family members to inform a sepsis public education campaign in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Sepsis is a life-threatening complication of the body's response to fighting an infection. The global burden of sepsis is incredibly high, accounting for an estimated 20% percent of all global deaths as well as high hospitalization costs and long-term multifaceted sequelae. As most sepsis starts in the community, public knowledge of sepsis is essential to rapid identification and medical intervention. The current study is part of multi-study collaborative research program. Following a scoping review and national survey to assess public knowledge of sepsis, we conducted focus groups to explore the lived experiences and perspectives of sepsis survivors and family members with the goal to inform development of a sepsis public education campaign. METHODS: We co-designed a focus group guide covering three broad discussion topics: circumstances leading to sepsis, impacts of sepsis, and interactions with healthcare providers. Participants were purposively recruited through the previous national survey and through Sepsis Canada communications. We used a hybrid deductive-inductive approach to code transcripts and generate themes related to developing a sepsis public education campaign. RESULTS: We conducted 11 focus groups with 32 participants. Participants' median age was 53 years (Interquartile Range = 48, 64). Three-quarters (n = 23/32; 72%) self-identified as women, and all participants reported having some post-secondary education. All but one sepsis survivor were adults at the time of their diagnosis. We synthesized three overarching campaign messages from participant's accounts of profound physical and mental impacts of sepsis and perceptions of health system failures: (1) sepsis is serious and common, (2) know the signs of sepsis, and (3) be health attentive and advocate health needs. Potential barriers to message uptake were: (1) sepsis is not well-known or easily understood, (2) perceptions that sepsis is not personally relevant, and (3) health messaging fatigue. Suggestions to effectively hook and draw public attention to sepsis centered on using personal stories and partnering with other health campaigns. CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis of participant's lived experiences with sepsis suggest that public communications should aim to (1) improve sepsis symptom recognition, (2) foster perceptions that sepsis is personally relevant, and (3) cultivate and support health advocacy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".