Dr. Colm Henry:

I will ask Dr. O'Dwyer to respond in a second but I will give an initial response. We do public awareness campaigns, some of which are quite simple. For example, the vaccination campaign sent a message to get vaccinated as it protects you against Covid. That was a simple message and people got it quickly, as can be seen from the number of people who took it up in Ireland. Other issues can lend themselves to public awareness campaigns. With stroke, for example, there is the face, arm, speech, time, FAST, campaign. Each facet of that is a symptom of stroke and again that is a simple message. In this area, finding a constellation that is simple, that people can lock into and that differentiates it from other conditions is more challenging than in stroke but nevertheless, it is possible.

The work we do with healthcare professionals does not at all exclude the work we wish to do raising awareness with the public. I wish to make that clear to the Deputy and to reassure him and the Hughes family. In tandem, we have messages to convey to the public about antibiotics. For many years, we have fought hard to encourage and foster a climate of appropriate use of antibiotics going from a time when antibiotics were overprescribed, leading to antimicrobial resistance. We have to integrate all this public messaging and these public campaigns into something the public gets, in that we do not want inappropriate, widespread use of antibiotics, because that encourages resistance and hospital-acquired infections such as Clostridium difficile, MRSA and all of those. We wish to twin that with a message of there being some people whose cases begin as infection, but culminate in a much more serious and common condition called sepsis. Early recognition and treatment is critical. I ask Dr. O'Dwyer to come in on this.