Regional access to a centralized extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) service in Victoria, Australia.

Introduction: Victoria, Australia provides a centralised state ECMO service, supported by ambulance retrieval. Equity of access to this service has not been previously described.

Objective: Describe the characteristics of ECMO recipients and quantify geographical and socioeconomic influence on access.

Performance of hospital administrative data for detection of sepsis in Australia: The sepsis coding and documentation (SECOND) study.

Background: Sepsis is the world's leading cause of death and its detection from a range of data and coding sources, consistent with consensus clinical definition, is desirable.

Objective: To evaluate the performance of three coding definitions (explicit, implicit, and newly proposed synchronous method) for sepsis derived from administrative data compared to a clinical reference standard.

Method: Extraction of administrative coded data from Australian metropolitan teaching hospital with 25,000 annual overnight admissions compared to clinical review of medical records; 313 (27.