Agenda item

The Committee received a presentation from Lisa Ward, ADN (Patient Safety) and CNIO Kirsty McGee, Al & AKI Marton & Sepsis Lead (for copy of presentation see file of minutes).

The presentation provided details of immediate actions taken; EPR modifications; clinical education; sepsis screening via medanets; sepsis audit January 2024 -EPR versus manual; sepsis 6 compliance within one hour; EPR data versus manual audit; in progress and next steps.

Mrs Gott asked what pathway GP practices had to follow if they suspected Sepsis.

Officers responded that there was national guidance for GPs and community sepsis tools were available. There was some work ongoing to allow paramedics to administer antibiotics if they suspected sepsis as they currently can only give antibiotics for meningitis.

In response to a question from Councillor Haney, the Officer responded that full baseline data was extraction from the electronic patient record.

Councillor Haney referred to the charts on medanets data and asked what this showed.

The Officer responded that it showed how many people were using the hand held devices to do their observations. The data was received on a daily basis and stated that they were carrying out some targeted work to ensure that the devices were been used.

Councillor Haney stated that he was reassured that the data was better than what was initially reported. He continued that one of the statistics that he had previously asked for was the average length of delay.

Officers responded that the guidance had changed from one hour to three hours and they needed to reflect this in their audit. They would like to keep the critical timeline. They do report delays in their audit and commented that with the new guidance they had the potential to wait three hours, but this would be based on clinical judgement.

In response to a further question from Councill Haney, the Officer advised that the prompt would appear on the desktop computer, but you don’t get the escalation that was triggered on the hand held device and the pods were used across the Trust with one doctor logged into the system to see the alerts.

Councillor Earley asked what the buy in was from clinical staff.

The Officer responded that the device was constantly alerting and was frustrating and one of the things they learnt quickly was to be critical about the alerts and turned off observations. The only time the device would make a noise was a sepsis alert or raised early warning. It was still a work in progress and were mindful that Junior Doctors have a lot of work and want to get to a point where the Lead Consultant also had a device. The devices could be used as a communication tool as it was multi-functional, and they were looking to only have one device going forward.

Resolved: That the contents of the presentation be noted.