Matt Harmon

37 Chapter two provided most of the responses. We used IP address to address potential duplicate responses to the survey. In total, there were 15 duplicate addresses. The majority of these duplicates had different respondent characteristics. In three cases, there were similar respondent characteristics. We did not remove these. Also, the respondents in this survey were predominantly from European countries, limiting the translatability to other countries. Finally, a large proportion of respondents said that rewarming decisions were nurse driven and only three nurses filled in the survey. We do not know how well the physicians’ answers reflect rewarming practices by nurses. Conclusions In conclusion, policies, procedures, and beliefs about spontaneous hypothermia and active rewarming in patients with sepsis are variable. The variation in practice must be taken into consideration in designing trials on temperature management in hypothermic sepsis patients. As a starting point, we propose a working group to define hypothermic sepsis to improve comparability of research on this subject.