Sepsis: National Register

Lord O'Shaughnessy Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manzoor]

My Lords, there is a clear need for better data collection on sepsis, but a registry uses retrospective data collection. Through the Government’s new national action plan on AMR, we will go beyond this and develop real-time patient data collection through data linkage. We will be working on this very closely.

[Lord O’Shaughnessy (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend is quite right to highlight this issue, and collecting this dataset is incredibly important. One of the ways it can be useful is in developing new diagnostic tools that will diagnose sepsis earlier through the use of technology. Can the Minister reassure the House that the dataset that she says will be collected will be available to the researchers and innovators developing these tools, to make sure we can diagnose sepsis quickly, fight it and deal with some of the deaths that my noble friend has highlighted?

[Baroness Manzoor]

My noble friend is right. Data linkage will make it easier to identify those most at risk of infections and sepsis, and to get them treated much quicker. Once that data is available, we will ensure that clinicians and everybody else in the NHS has that information so that they can deliver treatment as quickly as possible.