Patients suffering from sepsis, an infection of the blood and other areas of the body that leads to serious damage, are now less likely to face serious health issues after a successful training programme was introduced at Winchester and Eastleigh Healthcare Trust.
The training programme uses dummy bodies that work similarly to ours. Using these fake bodies for practice in treating sepsis teaches nurses and other hospital staff how to spot the beginning of infections, making treatment faster and more helpful to the patient.
For patients and the hospital staff the most important point about the programme is that it is now possible to stop sepsis before it causes much serious or life-threatening damage to the patient.
A patient is harmed by sepsis because their body will put pressure on itself to fight against an infection that could do the same amount of damage or more if the body did nothing to try and remove it.
A patient's health will become worse as a result of the infection. Normal activity, especially in the blood, changes and leads to dangerous problems such as blood clots. If sepsis goes untreated, organs like the heart can simply stop working.
Thanks to the new training programme at WEHCT the delay in treating sepsis has fallen. What used to take 7.5 hours now only takes around half that time or sometimes just two hours.
What makes this achievement so impressive is that for every hour sepsis isn't treated the chance of dying rises by 8%.
Serious cases of sepsis are not as much of a worry now for WEHCT. Time spent in the hospital by patients with sepsis has also fallen by 2-3 days and the number of deaths from sepsis is down from 26% to 16%.
For their hard work in the fight against sepsis members of WEHCT were congratulated at the National Patient Safety awards in London last month.
Dr Inada-Kim, leader of the training course, said: "It is a great honour to be recognised for our work in improving the outcome for patients with sepsis."
18 million people suffer from bad cases of sepsis around the world each year; every day 1,400 people die from it. Thanks to the work done by teams like those at WEHCT the fight against sepsis can be fought and won.
The training programme uses dummy bodies that work similarly to ours. Using these fake bodies for practice in treating sepsis teaches nurses and other hospital staff how to spot the beginning of infections, making treatment faster and more helpful to the patient.
For patients and the hospital staff the most important point about the programme is that it is now possible to stop sepsis before it causes much serious or life-threatening damage to the patient.
A patient is harmed by sepsis because their body will put pressure on itself to fight against an infection that could do the same amount of damage or more if the body did nothing to try and remove it.
A patient's health will become worse as a result of the infection. Normal activity, especially in the blood, changes and leads to dangerous problems such as blood clots. If sepsis goes untreated, organs like the heart can simply stop working.
Thanks to the new training programme at WEHCT the delay in treating sepsis has fallen. What used to take 7.5 hours now only takes around half that time or sometimes just two hours.
What makes this achievement so impressive is that for every hour sepsis isn't treated the chance of dying rises by 8%.
Serious cases of sepsis are not as much of a worry now for WEHCT. Time spent in the hospital by patients with sepsis has also fallen by 2-3 days and the number of deaths from sepsis is down from 26% to 16%.
For their hard work in the fight against sepsis members of WEHCT were congratulated at the National Patient Safety awards in London last month.
Dr Inada-Kim, leader of the training course, said: "It is a great honour to be recognised for our work in improving the outcome for patients with sepsis."
18 million people suffer from bad cases of sepsis around the world each year; every day 1,400 people die from it. Thanks to the work done by teams like those at WEHCT the fight against sepsis can be fought and won.
Hey Seb,
ReplyDeleteReally interesting article; i can't wait to hear the bulleting!
It does need reading through though, some of the sentences don't make sense and there are different tenses.
(probs happened whilst editing the peice, but thought i'd point it out befor it's marked!)
Well done on finding such an interesting subject!
sneaky...
ReplyDeletethe NHS did something right =) gdgd