NHS RightCare is helping the front line NHS to improve population healthcare across England,
and this call to action on sepsis is a vital part of that work.
Sepsis one of Britains biggest killers. Sepsis effects a quarter of a million people across
the United Kingdom every year and it causes more deaths that breast cancer, bowl cancer,
and prostate cancer put together. Poor treatment is causing thousands of preventable deaths,
was my mother one of them? She went in there not very ill, and inside 48 hours she was
dead.
Sepsis is the body's response to overwhelming infection. Often that starts are relatively
trivial infection, then progresses to something really quite serious. Although most people
receive prompt and effective treatment and make a good recovery there are a large number
of people who go on to suffer devastating consequences of sepsis, ranging from death
through to limb loss, organ failure, or loss of fingers and toes, and this can have a horrible
and long lasting effect on individuals and their families. The difficult thing about
sepsis is that it can be quite difficult to diagnose because it masquerades as so many
things in so many different individuals. The first thing to do in any diagnostic process
is to think of the diagnosis and the more people who potentially think of the diagnosis
the better and that's why the RightCare approach to sepsis is so important. One of the reasons
why I as National Medical Director and so many other clinicians are keen to tackle the
problem of sepsis in our society and our health service is that we've all seen the consequences
of sepsis and we've all felt that feeling of utter helplessness as we've seen patients
deteriorate in front of our eyes from sepsis that is out of control and in many cases that
is quite simply avoidable for everybody by making an early diagnosis and instituting
early treatment. This is not any one persons business, everybody has to think sepsis ranging
from patients and their families through to nurses and doctors in the healthcare system,
and we need to make it easy for the diagnosis to be confirmed and for treatment to be instituted
quickly, and that is the essence of the programatic approach that RightCare brings to the tackling
of this absolutely horrible problem which affects our service day in and day out. You
know, getting this right is just a big win for everybody, not only will we save lives
and untold suffering but we will also save money for the health service and society,
it's estimated that hospitals spend about a billion pounds a year on treating sepsis
and when you take the longer term consequences of sepsis into account it's estimated that
there is a financial burden of about 8 billion pounds a year on healthcare and social care
services. All of that could be better invested elsewhere. Because sepsis effects so many
people in this country and because it has such potentially devastating effects, and
because if we diagnose and treat it early we can make such a big impact it is clear
to me that sepsis, and tackling sepsis is everybody business, and the people that are
absolutely key in marshalling the war against sepsis and focusing on this endeavour are
commissioners who have oversight over the whole of our health and social care landscape
and so my plea today is to ask commissioners to take this very seriously and to work closely
with RightCare to bring a programatic approach to tackling sepsis across our society