Interestingly, the first hour of ED presentation seems to be the most critical hour. Administration of antibiotics and fluid resuscitation in the pre-hospital setting will reduce the time to administration substantially. In adults, to the best of our knowledge, no studies on the effect of pre-hospital administration of antibiotics have been performed. In children with meningitis, some uncontrolled studies show contradictory results, most probably due to bias by severity. We propose a non-blinded randomised multicentre clinical trial study on the efficacy of early, pre-hospital intravenous administration of broad spectrum antibiotics (ceftriaxone), which are effective against a wide variety of infectious pathogens that cause most common community-acquired infections) in patients referred to the ED with suspected severe sepsis or septic shock.