Tackling the growing challenges of sepsis

The conference, organised by Knowlex, began with a fascinating talk by Kenny Ajayi, patient safety, Imperial College Health Partners. He started proceedings by sharing information on how a national collaboration was assembled for the Suspicion of Sepsis (SOS) Insights Dashboard. As programme director, Kenny’s role involves driving change and innovation in patient safety across the health and social care system in north west London.

His talk was passionate, firstly identifying the problem of measuring sepsis, primarily because the body attacks its own organs, due to infection. “Nobody has ever had sepsis without first having an infection,” he said.

Sepsis is the severe, life-threatening end of infection, and arises when the body’s response to infection injures its own tissues and organs. Without early identification and treatment there is a significant risk of long-term disability or death. Sepsis doesn’t have a gold standard diagnostic test and there is no single, stable sepsis definition, meaning its frequency and deaths cannot be measured or compared over time, only roughly estimated. This has been compounded by coding changes this year that led to an increase in reported sepsis numbers. This has highlighted the need for a proxy measure, and the only credible, reproducible and easily obtainable proxy measure is of those admitted to hospital with infection - the Suspicion of Sepsis (SOS) category