Ms Doireann O'Mahony:

I thank the Deputy for all the tireless work that he has been doing over the past several years for the Hughes family and for others. Following up on the figures that he mentioned, I would like to add that there are some oddities. For example, the fifth annual sepsis summit cost €1,845 in 2018. The sixth summit in 2019 cost €10,502. It seems like a staggering increase in spending. Further, I see that €27,300 was spent on e-learning in 2021, when €87,950 had already been spent in 2019. That is a lot of funds. For people like Joe and other families, these are eye-watering figures, but we want to see tangible evidence of a commitment to driving meaningful change in highlighting and raising awareness of sepsis. With that in mind, we founded our charity in September last year, which is sepsis awareness month. We are delighted to have Joe and Karen on board as members, in addition to a number of others.

I had the idea for the charity because, in the course of my legal work over the past decade, I saw sepsis recur as a theme throughout the cases I was dealing with. I repeatedly saw cases involving people dying from sepsis. I saw sepsis listed on death certificates and at coroners' inquests. I met people whose lives had been destroyed by this condition. As the Deputy rightly points out, is quite startling when one considers how prevalent it is and how eminently treatable it is. We are not looking for anything ground-breaking here. To be fair to Joe and this petition, we are not asking for the sun, moon and stars. We are not looking for a cure. There is a cure. We are simply looking for awareness among members of the community.

I would like to report to the sixth national sepsis outcome report of 2020, which was published in May last year. On the second page of the report, the authors outline six processes which must occur to give patients the best opportunity to survive sepsis. The first of those is, "The unwell person, their family or carer must be aware of the signs and symptoms of sepsis and the need to seek early medical review." Following from that, we are asking what exactly is being done, if this has been identified year on year by the HSE. Why does sepsis remain this silent killer that nobody knows about until it visits their household?

Regrettably, we as a charity have no funding from the Department or the HSE. We are reliant on the goodwill of people like Joe and the Corcoran family from Cork, who lost Tracey, who would have had her 40th birthday today had she not lost her battle with sepsis in June 2020. We are reliant on the goodwill of people like them to keep this charity going. I am here on behalf of the Irish Sepsis Foundation to lend our voices to the petition. It might be interesting to draw the committee's attention to a comparator, which is Scotland, our neighbour, with a similar population to Ireland, of 5.3 million people and, broadly speaking, the same life expectancy, quality of life, and so on.

In Scotland in 2018, £70,000 in funding was secured. That was given by the Scottish Government and used to deliver Scotland's sepsis charity campaign. Part of the campaign was a television advert, which was extremely effective. The health secretary of Scotland agreed to the campaign in 2017 after meeting a campaigner, Craig Stobo, who had lost his wife, Fiona, and their unborn daughter, Isla, to sepsis, and it was on foot of that meeting that the funding was secured. Subsequently, a survey was conducted in Scotland and 77% of the respondents indicated they understood the signs and symptoms of sepsis after that campaign and television advert. Something similar should occur here. As the Deputy rightly pointed out, it would not cost the Department a huge sum.