A public campaign to combat the danger of sepsis in children is being supported across the Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust.
The national Public Health England campaign is aimed at the parents and carers of
children under the age of five to raise their awareness of what sepsis is, help them to recognise the symptoms of sepsis and encourage them to seek urgent medical help.
Dr Lesley Jordan, Consultant Anaesthetist and Patient Safety lead at the RUH, said: “Early diagnosis is so important in successfully treating sepsis, so raising public
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Less than three in five A&E arrivals at Royal United Hospitals Bath seen within four hoursJust two-thirds of A&E arrivals at the University Hospitals of Bristol and Weston seen within four hoursawareness of the condition is of paramount importance.
“We have also done lots of work promoting awareness among GPs, including specific work by one of our junior doctors aiming to improve detection of sepsis in children in general practice.”
The Bath RUH is a leader in sepsis education, pioneering a training scheme to teach more than 600 staff in sixty days about how to quickly identify and treat the potentially life-threatening condition. The training project team were chosen as finalists in this year’s National Patient Safety Care Awards for their work. Since July, more than 800 RUH staff have been trained, following new national guidelines for the management of sepsis and the RUH model has proved so successful, that other NHS Trusts in the region have adopted its techniques to train 3,000 more.
There are 150,000 cases of sepsis every year in the UK, including 25,000 children,
resulting in 44,000 deaths – more than bowel, breast and prostate cancer combined.
For further information, visit: www.nhs.uk/sepsis or: www.sepsistrust.org