Martin Browne (Tipperary, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Before I let in others, I want to make a few points. Can we get to the issue of public awareness? It appears that the focus is on informing the medical community, which is highly important as well but which is not matched by a public awareness campaign. The targeted health programme is fine but there are another 11 months in the year besides September, which is sepsis month; sepsis is a year-long problem. In 2020, there were 11,294 documented cases of sepsis in Ireland. That works out at 31 cases per day. Surely that should ring alarm bells that there needs to be way more of a public awareness campaign outside of just September. We have had campaigns encouraging the public to quit smoking and wear seat belts and every one of those issues is important in its own right but some of the figures we heard here the day Mr. Hughes was before the committee include one in five deaths worldwide being linked to sepsis. Those kind of figures make it unbelievable that there is no campaign, and it is small money to run a campaign over a 12-month period in the overall scheme of things. Why has a year-round campaign, on television and radio especially, not been taken up? I know one of the points made in the opening statement related to social media but with social media I can sit on my phone, scroll through it and most of us will not even look at something like that, whereas if it is on the radio there is probably a family sitting around listening to it and if it is on television then people are looking at it. Why have we not had a nationwide campaign on sepsis on radio and television?