The below Parliamentary question was asked by Justin Madders on 2016-02-01.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what his Department plans to do to ensure that healthcare staff and GPs are adequately trained to recognise the symptoms of sepsis.
Ben Gummer
NHS England is undertaking a number of steps to improve diagnosis and treatment of sepsis, which have been coordinated through a cross-system programme board run by NHS England.
In April 2015 NHS England introduced a new national Commissioning for Quality and Innovation measure (financial incentive) to incentivise hospitals accepting emergency admissions to screen eligible patients for sepsis when they arrive, and to administer intravenous antibiotics within one hour for patients with severe sepsis or septic shock.
Additionally NHS England has made available a voluntary audit tool for general practitioners (GPs) enabling them to assess their care of children with a fever under five years old against the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines, which can be a pre-cursor to sepsis. Primary care IT suppliers have provided data entry templates for the tool which prompts GPs to enter the appropriate observations thereby improving the quality of the patient care record, as well as promoting the use of the NICE guidance.
NICE is currently consulting on a new Sepsis Clinical Guideline that will be published this year, which will make recommendations about the assessment, diagnosis and initial management of patients with sepsis.
The Government has mandated Health Education England (HEE) to provide national leadership on education, training and workforce development in the National Health Service in England.
It is the responsibility of the professional regulators to set the standards and outcomes for education and training and approve training curricular to ensure newly qualified healthcare professionals are equipped with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to provide high quality patient care.
HEE will work with bodies that set curricula such as the General Medical Council and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) to seek to ensure training meets the needs of patients.
HEE is currently developing an awareness video that will target primary care staff on recognising sepsis in children. A separate piece of work involving the RCGP is focusing on an e-learning package on sepsis in primary care, to ensure that the primary care workforce is ably equipped to deal with sepsis in the general population, including children.
HEE is currently undertaking a scoping exercise on training available for health professionals to recognise and manage sepsis in all patient groups. This survey scoped HEE local offices, NHS organisations, Academic Health Science Network, Ambulance Trusts and Royal Colleges on the resources currently available, which are being reviewed, and recommendations will be made in March 2016.
