2. What is the Welsh Government doing to promote sepsis awareness across the health and social care sector? OAQ51892

Thank you for the question. Tackling sepsis remains a top patient safety priority in Wales, with work continuing through the 1000 Lives improvement programme, which I know the Member will be aware of. That is to raise awareness and ensure early detection and treatment of patients with sepsis. This work includes peer review, as well as improving practice outside of acute hospital settings.

Cabinet Secretary, you will know that, in my role as Chair of the cross-party group on sepsis, I wrote to every single GP practice in Wales, and had a very disappointing only 11 responses, asking them what they knew about sepsis prevention and what tools they had. I've subsequently followed that up with letters to every social care head in Wales. A great response—over 60 per cent of them have responded so far. And they were far more informative, and they were talking about the fact that, actually, within the social care sector there's perhaps less awareness of it and they don't have any specific tools. And I do appreciate the fact that your colleague Huw Irranca-Davies has offered to speak at the next cross-party group on sepsis, but I wondered if you could tell us how the Government might be able to ensure that sepsis training is carried out throughout the whole of our NHS provision, to make sure that everybody, from allied healthcare professionals all the way up to the top consultant, really understand what sepsis is and what we can do to prevent it. 

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. 

Rhun ap Iorwerth.

I have no question.