Dr. Ciara Martin:

Public awareness is extremely important but it is also hard. We are sitting here saying sepsis is difficult to diagnose when you come into a hospital, even with laboratory tests. To put pressure on parents to be the diagnosticians is wrong. What we have done and what we are doing, including with Lil Red’s Legacy Sepsis Awareness Campaign, is highlighting to parents when they should seek medical help and when they should worry about their children, particularly in children as Dr. Henry mentioned. It is different if you have a baby. We say to pay attention and that if they have a fever you need to go and seek help, particularly if the temperature is over 38°C or 38.5°C. When it comes to whether the baby is feeding or vomiting or has wet nappies, that can be a lot of different infections, from a respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, infection to an early sepsis infection. A lot of it is helping parents understand what to look out for. We have a lot of information on mychild.iefor families to look at and in recent years we have tried to improve that to say on the website what there is to worry about for children.

Teenagers are particularly difficult and that came through in some of the talks from the families this morning. It is that restlessness and that pain out of proportion to what you would expect. Particularly with sepsis, a child who is not getting better or who seems to be getting better on the first day and then gets sicker again is a red flag that we ask people to look for and to look for medical help then.