Following World Sepsis Day in September, the need to speed up diagnosis and improve treatment of sepsis has been high on the agenda. The Clinical Services Journal reports.
Sepsis kills 37,000 patients needlessly in the UK every year.1 Patients admitted to hospital with severe sepsis are five times more likely to die than those admitted with a heart attack or stroke. The most common causes of severe sepsis are pneumonia, bowel perforation, urinary infection, and severe skin infections. However, there is often a failure to recognise sepsis quickly enough and patients are not given antibiotics and other treatment in time to save lives.
Sepsis is an illness that affects all parts of the body that can happen in response to an infection and can quickly become life-threatening. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlights that, in severe cases of sepsis, one or more organs may fail. In the worst cases, sepsis can cause blood pressure to drop and the heart to weaken, leading to septic shock. Once this happens, multiple organs may quickly fail and the patient can die.2
According to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, Julie Mellor, not enough improvements have been made by the NHS to tackle sepsis. Last year, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman published its report, Time to Act,1 which made 10 recommendations following its investigations into the deaths of patients from sepsis.
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