Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will start by saying a few "thank-you's" to the committee, because Karen and Joe made the petition directly. I was not aware of the Committee on Public Petitions and the Ombudsmen until they made the petition directly. The committee has been really strong in taking this up and pursuing it. I thank the witnesses for being here. For people at such a senior level to be here acknowledges how the HSE is responding to this issue, but also points to its determination to continue to respond to it. When I see the senior nature of people here, I hear that. As well as the words they are saying, their presence here is important. I acknowledge Dr. Healy and the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, met with the Hughes family and me. There were some discussions in this area as well. We should probably acknowledge the Minister, Deputy Harris, who at the very early stages of all of this, prior to Covid, gave a commitment to try to undertake some work in this space.

I do not think I ever got a chance - I was on the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response, when there were plenty of times I asked Dr. Henry very hard and difficult questions which were probably impossible to answer - to thank Dr. Henry for the work he did during the Covid period. It gets to the nub of what we are talking about here today. Covid was a period where we had national focus. Everybody was listening to everything Dr. Henry and many others were saying. They had an opportunity to explain behaviour methods, infection control and social distancing. These were concepts with which many people were not familiar. They had lots of attention and ability to explain those concepts. It had a crucial impact in Ireland's having an exceptional response to Covid. We do not often give ourselves credit for the response we had. In some ways, all of that took a bit of the steam out of what we had hoped would happen with a sepsis-awareness campaign, because Covid was happening and nothing else was happening in the country. Now that it passed, we are in a different space. No one's attention is on anything anymore. We are back to normal life, thank God, and in that competing space we wish to punch through public health messages.

I will focus on two things. Dr. Healy said to me at the meeting with Mr. Donnelly that they had focused on the GPs. I had not thought of that and was persuaded by it as strategy, because the Hughes family always talk about the phrase "Could it be sepsis?". There is no point in the public saying that if the doctor is not thinking it. If the witnesses are saying they are training and increasing awareness for GPs and perhaps for pharmacists as well - I agree with Deputy Buckley on that - and if the GP is asking if it might be sepsis, that is an investment worth making. I hear that and with regard to the money the witnesses have outlined, I am persuaded they have followed that strategy. It is harder for us to see sepsis though. That is the difficulty. I suppose the magic solution would be if the GP or the doctor in an accident and emergency department was asking whether it could be sepsis. If that was prompted by a patient asking whether it could be sepsis, that is the magic solution, in that both sides are thinking they should be considering this common, but rare, disease. I do not know how doctors do infection control. It is such a difficult area to diagnose and to predict where an infection will go. I understand it is not an exact science and is very difficult to communicate.

I think the witnesses are kind of part way through the process, which is the internal process with GPs and other stakeholders. In the process of looking outside, have they looked at how sepsis might be treated in other countries; how it is communicated; what the tools are with which one might persuade and the value for money for different offerings? If the witnesses tell me €500,000 on our TV advertising campaign could be better spent by double that impact on a radio campaign, I could be persuaded that would be a better thing to do. We do not need to be micromanaging how it is done, but we wish to see public awareness. We want all of us, in our day-to-day lives, to be seeing the word sepsis and asking ourselves "Could it be sepsis?". That is a helpful space in which to direct us.