Sepsis is an illness where the success of treatment heavily depends on early detection.
Westmead Hospital Emergency Nurse Gladis Kabil received a 2025 Westmead Charitable Trust Career Development Award for her research into ways to improve sepsis recognition at triage.
“If the triage nurse recognizes sepsis early and puts the patient on the Sepsis Pathway for management that can have tremendous impact on how long they wait for treatment,” Gladis said.
If sepsis is diagnosed late or missed, the impact can be catastrophic.
“If we don’t treat sepsis early, it can progress to septic shock which can then result in multiple organs failing at the same time, and it can also lead to death,” Gladis said.
Ensuring accurate diagnosis of this complex illness can be difficult, even for a senior clinician to do.
“Some patients might have the typical checklist features, but there are a lot of patients who don’t fit into the box,” Gladis said.
Gladis is one of three healthcare workers to receive a grant from the Westmead Charitable Trust.
“It can affect anyone, which is a problem, even healthy individuals with no previous medical problems, kids, older people, young and fit people,” Gladis said.
Her research involves analysing clinical notes of triage nurses which records their assessment to determine whether there are signs or patterns in patients who have been identified to have sepsis during their visit to the emergency department.
“What I’m hoping to achieve from this is to provide a tool kit for triage nurses, for example, asking a set of questions, or doing an assessment that might improve the likelihood of us recognizing sepsis earlier at triage,” Gladis said.
Gladis highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of Western Sydney area as impetus for improvement.
“We all have that standardized way of asking questions for example, to assess severity of pain, we ask on a scale of zero to 10, how bad is your pain?”
Gladis says while the example of someone describing their own pain may appear to be a simple question, there are cultural nuances which can influence the patients answer and potentially impact the diagnosis.
“Different cultures express pain differently, some cultures consider it as a weakness to display emotions and pain so they mask their pain.”
“The terms used for pain differ across dialects so there are multiple factors in how that communication occurs ,” Gladis said.
Based on the results of this study, targeted care models will be designed to improve recognition of sepsis specifically to meet the needs of the Western Sydney population visiting our emergency departments.
“Sepsis is quite easy to manage if we identify it early enough.”
“The problem, though, is the recognition of sepsis is usually a challenge and that’s why this project is trying to look at that aspect specifically,” Gladis said.