WHY IS THE NHS ALLOWING SO MANY NEEDLESS DEATHS?

SEPSIS, a stealthy killer that claims 44,000 lives a year in the UK, is the dirty big secret at the heart of the NHS.

While a further 100,000 people a year survive sepsis, they’re often left with serious long-term complications, including irreversible damage to lungs, heart, kidneys and brain and limb amputations.

Sepsis targets young and old alike and accounts for more deaths than lung, bowel and breast cancer combined.

All too often, the NHS is failing to recognise the telltale signs until it is far too late, as tragically illustrated by the needless deaths of toddlers William Mead, whose story the Mail highlighted last week, and Maude Watkins, whose parents have spoken so movingly here.

Shamefully, NHS England’s survival rate lags woefully behind best practice in other countries — including, incredibly, other parts of the UK.

HOSPITAL FAILURES

SEPSIS patients admitted to hospital in England have a 30 per cent chance of dying, compared to 24 per cent in Wales, and 20 per cent in Scotland. (In some U.S. hospitals the death rate is just 9 per cent.)

This disparity ‘really is a scandal’, according to Ron Daniels, a consultant in critical care and anaesthesia at Good Hope Hospital, Birmingham, who is leading the charge for improvements in sepsis care.

Over the past few years, Dr Daniels and the charity UK Sepsis Trust have developed the clinical tools to help doctors spot and treat sepsis. If more widely used, these could save thousands of lives every year.

But while they have been adopted in Wales and Scotland — ‘because if the central teams there say, “You should do this”, it tends to get done’, says Dr Daniels — take-up has been patchy in England’s more decentralised NHS. ‘Scotland and Wales have also put significant resources and a central team behind this,’ says Dr Daniels.

If the death rate across the rest of the UK was cut to 20 per cent, as it has been in Scotland, ‘we would be saving between 12,000 and 14,000 more lives a year,’ he adds. ‘And we know we can do it, because if Scotland can, England can.’

THE VITAL TESTS

TODAY, with the support of the parents of William Mead and Maude Watkins, the Mail launches a campaign calling on Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to introduce an awareness programme to identify the signs and dangers of sepsis to patients and doctors alike.

The NHS must also commit to ensuring that the clinical tools developed by the UK Sepsis Trust to help doctors spot and combat the condition are adopted as widely and as quickly as possible.

As things stand, awareness of sepsis among doctors in England is shockingly poor. A report into sepsis care published last year found that ‘a good outcome for many appears to depend primarily on recognising the problem and doing the simple things right and promptly’.

However, in the majority of cases reviewed, ‘sadly that’s not what is happening’. In a third of cases eventually diagnosed as sepsis in hospital, GPs hadn’t checked any of the four basic signs of temperature, pulse, blood pressure and respiratory rate, missing an early opportunity to act on sepsis.

Furthermore, when these patients reached A&E, ‘things did not always improve very much’, with diagnosis delayed over and over again.

And timely treatment is the difference between life and death.

Patients with suspected sepsis need oxygen, intravenous antibiotics and fluids as rapidly as possible, to help failing lungs, counter the infection and compensate for a dangerous drop in blood pressure.

And if there’s a source of infection that can be dealt with — such as an abscess — it needs removing urgently. Waiting for blood test results to come back before treating a patient can prove fatal.

That’s why Dr Daniels and the UK Sepsis Trust developed the Sepsis Six: three tests and the three treatments (antibiotics, intravenous fluids and oxygen) that must be given within the all important ‘golden hour’ of sepsis first even being suspected.

‘Time is of the essence,’ says Dr Daniels. ‘Every hour of delay after diagnosis increases the risk of death by 8 per cent.’

And yet last year’s report found that, shockingly, ‘the majority of patients do not receive antimicrobial drugs [antibiotics] within an hour of the diagnosis’.

Educating professionals is only half the job, says Dr Daniels. ‘We believe that the tragic deaths of William Mead and Maude Watkins highlight an urgent need to educate the public with a campaign similar to Act F.A.S.T. for stroke.’

Launched in 2009, the £12.5 million stroke campaign led to 4,300 fewer people becoming disabled and saved many lives, halving the death rate to 39,000 a year. It also saved the NHS more than £330 million.

Most people ‘don’t want to make a fuss or be seen to be over-anxious’, says Dr Daniels. ‘But we need to empower people to feel they can call 999 or phone their GP and say: “I’m worried this might be sepsis.” ’

CALL TO ACTION

WILLIAM MEAD’S mother, Melissa, is supporting the Mail’s call for action.

‘Had I been privy to a sepsis campaign, there is a chance I would have looked at William’s symptoms differently and thought, “sepsis”,’ she says. Instead, the family was repeatedly reassured that William had a typical childhood virus.

‘The need for a national campaign has gone beyond important, it’s vital,’ she says. ‘We absolutely need to have the danger of sepsis drummed home. I want to see it on the TV, on the sides of buses, in Tube stations, in the bounty packs that are given to new parents.

‘I cannot allow my son to have died in vain.’