Dr. Michael O'Dwyer:

One talks about the risks involved in the public awareness campaign. We would love the public to be aware of the signs and symptoms of sepsis and present early. It is a very complicated disease to pick up and it is very difficult to give somebody a simple message about the disease. It is not about creating fear in the community as such. That might drive lots of unnecessary additional emergency department visits. It may be about an expectation that patients need antibiotics for things they do not get antibiotics for. We have to link in with our colleagues throughout the HSE that take a more wide view of this, especially the antimicrobial resistance and infection control, AMRIC, group. We have regular meetings with the group and we are talking about how to move forward to get that message out and across in a sensible manner. With moving, we have focused on the hospital and acute settings, because that may be where the easy gains might have been able to be made in the first couple of years. Now, we are trying to reach out to the community and GPs and within that, there is a public-awareness element. We appointed our first GP lead for sepsis at the start of March and our intention is to work with that person, along with the AMRIC group, to bring the GPs into the fold of early awareness, detection and treatment. Through their interaction with the public in the GP surgeries and furthermore, through the pharmacies for patients who go on to purchase other medications perhaps for the early start of an infection, the aim will be to work on how to best assess whether it is getting better and when the right time to approach to the hospital is. The message is a difficult one to get across, but we are working on trying to find the best way to do so.