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Assessment of illness severity in community acquired pneumonia: a useful new prediction tool?

Consultant in General and Respiratory Medicine, Manchester Royal Infirmary, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9WL; mark.woodhead@cmmc.nhs.uk

Keywords: community acquired pneumonia; severity assessment

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Illness severity might usefully guide a number of management decisions in the care pathway of a patient with community acquired pneumonia (CAP). Whether to refer to hospital by the primary care physician, whether to admit by the hospital junior doctor, what investigations to perform, what antibiotic(s) to give, and whether to admit to the intensive care unit (ICU) are just some examples. This approach is captured to a varying extent in a number of the published management guidelines for CAP.^1–5 While a clinical prediction tool to assess severity might therefore be helpful, there is no agreement on what constitutes the best approach to this. Additional caveats are that such a tool would need to be better than current practice, would need to accurately do what it sets out to do (that is, predict outcome), would need to be simple to use in a variety of settings, would . . . [Full text of this article]

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