Sepsis

Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 1:35 pm on 14 March 2018.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 1:35, 14 March 2018

Greater awareness amongst our clinical staff is one of our priorities, to detect symptoms and then to act appropriately. And that is work on the new system, the early warning score system—the first country to introduce it in 2012. That's helped us to improve on our record on sepsis. The outcomes that we then deliver—there's been a significant fall in deaths in Wales from sepsis in the last five or six years, but, actually, there's still more to go. I think, in the last year that I saw figures for, there were about 1,600 deaths from sepsis, whereas I think, five or six years previously, it was over 2,100. So, there's been a fall, but there's still a significant number of people who are losing their lives through sepsis. I don't think we'd be able to stop every one of those deaths, but we still think that there's significant further improvement to be made. And I recognise your point about local healthcare, and about staff outside of a hospital setting. That is one of our focuses. So, the awareness raising we're actually doing jointly with the Sepsis Trust is largely based on raising awareness in local healthcare settings, for people who attend, but in particular for the variety of staff who will go through those local healthcare settings. So, I recognise the seriousness with which you address the work and the cross-party group, but I expect we'll continue to talk about this in this Chamber, as well as in the cross-party group, until we continue to see a further and sustained improvement again in both sepsis awareness and outcomes for individual citizens.