Sepsis Awareness Month

Vikki Slade Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mike Wood (Kingswinford and South Staffordshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered World Sepsis Awareness Month.

As co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on sepsis, I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this debate. To the best of my knowledge, this is the very first debate in the House of Commons Chamber dedicated to sepsis. In the past, this devastating condition has been discussed only in Westminster Hall debates or raised through brief interventions and questions. Having sepsis debated on the Floor of the main Chamber during Sepsis Awareness Month is a major milestone, not only for Parliament but for the clinicians, charities and bereaved families across the country who have campaigned tirelessly to bring this condition out of the shadows.

I would also like to thank the co-sponsors of this debate: the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson), who cannot be here this afternoon but who led an important Westminster Hall debate on this subject two years ago, and the hon. Member for Dartford (Jim Dickson), vice-chair of the APPG.

Sepsis strikes indiscriminately, ruthlessly and with terrifying speed, without regard for background, class or, indeed, political allegiance. It is vital that we all stand united in our determination to tackle this deadly condition. It is a challenge that completely transcends party politics.

On Sunday, communities across the world marked World Sepsis Day. The international theme for this year could not be more apt: “Invest in Sepsis—Save Lives.” The World Health Organisation recognises sepsis as one of the leading causes of death and disability globally, estimating that sepsis-related illnesses account for one in every five deaths worldwide. In the United Kingdom, NHS England has made it clear that sepsis claims more lives each year than lung cancer and represents the second biggest killer in our hospitals after cardiovascular disease.

Every single year, an estimated 245,000 people in the UK develop sepsis and, tragically, more than 48,000 lose their lives. That is a higher annual death toll than bowel, breast and prostate cancers combined. Behind every one of those figures is a family left grieving and asking the same agonising question: what if? What if the symptoms had been recognised an hour earlier? What if antibiotics had been administered sooner? What if someone had simply asked, “Could it be sepsis?”?

Madam Deputy Speaker, as you know, I do not approach this debate purely as a parliamentarian dispassionately analysing policy responses to one of the leading causes of avoidable death. I stand in this Chamber today because almost a decade ago, by the grace of God and the extraordinary skill and care of NHS staff, my life was saved.

In January 2017, I was a relatively fit and active 40-year-old Member of Parliament. I had developed what I assumed was merely a winter infection. Like many people would, I assumed that I could push through it, take some paracetamol and carry on working. I travelled out to Strasbourg to take part in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the Sunday evening, but within days my condition collapsed. An ordinary throat infection triggered a catastrophic immune response. My body, in attempting to fight the infection, began attacking its own tissues and organs.

By Thursday, after seeing a French GP, I flew back to Britain. On Friday, I attended the official launch of the local enterprise zone that I had campaigned hard for in my constituency, but as soon as I arrived there I was so ill that I had to rest in the back room. On Saturday morning, I got out of bed, started putting my suit on over my pyjamas and told my wife Laura that I had to come down to Westminster to vote. Like many in politics, my behaviour can at times appear to some people to be a little idiosyncratic; fortunately, Laura realised that, even for a Member of Parliament, that was not entirely normal behaviour.

Laura rushed me to Russells Hall hospital in Dudley, where my blood pressure plummeted into septic shock and my organs began shutting down. My life was hanging by a thread. The medical team had to place me in a medically induced coma. Doctors told my family that my chances of pulling through were no better than one in 10.

For 11 days, I lay in intensive care on life support—or, as my family sometimes remind me, I slept through the difficult bits. When I did finally wake up, my muscles had wasted away—I could barely lift my arms, let alone stand or walk—but it could easily have been so much worse. What if Laura had left me to get some rest that Saturday morning while she took our daughter to her dance class? Above all, what if the nurse who examined me at the accident and emergency department had not had the insight to check whether the symptoms, which could easily have been mistaken for other illnesses such as flu or meningitis, might be sepsis? I owe a debt of gratitude to the doctors, intensive care nurses and other staff at Russells Hall hospital that I can never repay, but as long as I have the honour of serving in this House, I will use my voice to fight for sepsis patients and their families.

There is a common misconception that sepsis is primarily the result of hospital-acquired infection, but the evidence demonstrates the exact opposite. A major 2024 population study led by Professor van Staa, analysing linked primary care and hospital data in England, showed that the vast majority of sepsis cases are community acquired, developing in homes, workplaces and local communities long before a patient reaches an acute hospital bed. That research also uncovered deep health inequalities in sepsis risk.

The risk of developing sepsis is significantly heightened by socioeconomic deprivation, by frailty, by being housebound and by chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes and learning disabilities. Exposure to antibiotics in the previous two months was also identified as a strong risk factor. While ethnicity was not an independent biological factor, black and Asian individuals suffer from a higher prevalence of predisposing conditions including diabetes, chronic liver disease and severe anaemia, which puts them at a greater risk, so tackling sepsis is not merely a technical, clinical issue but a fundamental challenge of health inequality and community prevention.

One of the most critical clinical lessons learned in recent years is the direct link between viral infections and sepsis. For decades, the public and the medical community viewed sepsis almost exclusively as a bacterial complication, but the covid-19 pandemic demonstrated that viral infections can trigger the exact same catastrophic septic response. The overwhelming cytokine storms, microvascular clotting and rapid progression to acute respiratory distress syndrome and multi-organ failure seen in covid intensive care units are classic manifestations of viral sepsis. It is thought by many experts in the field that the vast majority of covid deaths were a direct result of septic reactions.

Sepsis is not defined by the pathogen; it is defined by the body’s life-threatening immune reaction to any severe infection, whether bacterial, viral or fungal. That reality extends directly into long-term recovery: millions who had covid-19 are still living with long covid. Sepsis survivors have known that reality for generations under the name of post-sepsis syndrome. In my case, it is little more than some nerve damage and tiredness, even a decade later, but for many the symptoms are more severe. Up to 50% of sepsis survivors suffer prolonged physical, cognitive and psychological impairments from debilitating fatigue and cognitive brain fog to severe muscle weakness and post-traumatic stress disorder. The clinical insights gained from viral sepsis during the pandemic must now be used to build integrated recovery pathways for all sepsis survivors.

To curb preventable deaths, a health system must act decisively in several areas; in the interests of time, I will go through just four. First, the system must ensure consistent rapid recognition. Time is the single most decisive factor in sepsis survival. Clinical research shows that administering appropriate antibiotics within the first hour of a patient presenting to an emergency department with sepsis reduces the risk of death by a full one third compared with delayed treatment.

Secondly, the system must ensure that where sepsis is suspected, appropriate clinical escalation pathways are in place. Where sepsis is suspected, early warning systems such as the national early warning score 2, or NEWS2, have saved countless lives, and the ongoing roll-out of Martha’s rule across NHS trusts, which has already saved thousands of lives, is vital in ensuring that patients and loved ones can trigger an immediate independent critical review when they sense deterioration.

Thirdly, we must take advantage of innovation in rapid diagnostics. We know that administering broad-spectrum antibiotics within the golden hour that I spoke of massively increases survival rates, but clinicians often face the dilemma of judging whether that is compatible with responsible antimicrobial stewardship. Deploying rapid molecular diagnostics, bedside biomarker technologies and wearable continuous physiological monitors can remove that guesswork, and provide targeted care before septic shock takes hold and it can be too late.

Fourthly, although Britain has in many ways led the way in developing and enhancing sepsis care and treatment, we must be open to learning from established international models and practices. Sweden utilises standard sepsis alerts to prioritise patients at triage, and implements mandatory post-discharge telephone follow-ups. France, where I was when I was taken ill, has since introduced an integrated national sepsis plan spanning pre-hospital recognition, emergency pathways and structured rehabilitation to help patients return to employment. Australia established a national sepsis clinical care standard built around seven quality statements, ensuring end-to-end consistency from triage through to survivorship. The publication in July of the sepsis modern service framework by NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care is an important step towards doing that and learning the lessons from around the world; I warmly welcome it. The framework is one of the first to be published under the 10-year health plan. Its headline goal,

“to reduce deaths, severe complications and long-term harm from sepsis…by at least 25% by 2035”

is a target that every member of this House can endorse.

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a really moving speech. Although one in 100 cases of sepsis in adults is linked to meningitis, it is one in 10 for children—with harrowing consequences. One of those children is Hamish, who was a classmate of my nephew Louis in Sussex. He had all four limbs amputated, and I pay tribute to his resilience in getting on with life and going to university. Because of the link between vaccines and the prevention of sepsis, will the hon. Member join me in calling for the menB vaccine to be repeated for teenagers next year and every year until all children are protected, so we can reduce the risk of sepsis in young people?

[Mike Wood]

The hon. Lady makes a really important point. We know how these conditions can come round in a cycle. In order to break that cycle, we will need multiple years of vaccination.

The modern service framework contains a number of vital commitments, but I particularly welcome: action 4 on improving the audit and feedback of sepsis-related clinical data across trusts; action 5 on updating training for NHS staff, social care workers and unpaid carers; action 9 on optimising care pathways and expanding access to rapid diagnostics and specialist advice; action 11 on standardising digital specifications for early warning systems such as NEWS2; and action 12 on reviewing and addressing capacity gaps in critical and enhanced care.

A strategy on paper will not be enough to save a deteriorating patient on a cold winter weekend in an overcrowded emergency department. In the other place, my noble friend and our former colleague Lord Mackinlay of Richborough, who has spoken with enormous courage about his own life-altering encounter with sepsis, has repeatedly tabled written questions seeking clarity on how this framework will be delivered. Regrettably, the answers provided by Ministers in the Lords to date have been rather generic and vague, and lacking in operational detail. We cannot accept boilerplate responses on a condition that kills 48,000 people each year, so I have two direct questions that I hope the Minister will answer in her response to today’s debate. First, what are the specific milestone-driven timelines for the delivery of each of the actions set out in the modern service framework, and when will trusts and integrated care boards be expected to have these standardised pathways fully operational? Secondly, can the Minister assure the House that the Department of Health and Social Care is prepared to commit the dedicated investment required to make this framework work?

When we call for investment, we must be clear that funding sepsis care is not an open-ended cost. It is one of the most cost-effective investments that the Department can make. Sepsis currently places an enormous financial burden on the national health service and the wider economy. Too often, cases of missed or delayed diagnosis and treatment result in weeks of high-cost intensive care unit admissions, in emergency readmissions due to incomplete recovery, in complex surgical interventions including amputations requiring lifelong prosthetic and social care support, or in the permanent loss of working-age adults from the workforce. Investing in rapid bedside diagnostics, digital early warning systems, specialist outreach teams and structured post-sepsis rehabilitation can dramatically reduce the lengths of stay in intensive care, lower readmission rates and keep people in work. Early intervention is not only clinically imperative; it is economically sound, and the theme “Invest in sepsis—save lives” is a call for smart preventive healthcare investment.

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[Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)]

I am pleased to co-sponsor the debate alongside the hon. Members for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire (Mike Wood) and for Ashfield (Lee Anderson), both of whom are fellow officers of the all-party parliamentary group on sepsis. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire for that amazingly moving and revealing speech and for sharing his experience in a way that I hope all Members will take note of and that will make a difference to the way the Government take these issues forward. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this debate on Sepsis Awareness Month, with World Sepsis Day having taken place on Sunday.

I was pleased to welcome my constituent, John Snow, to Parliament last year and am extremely appreciative that he is with us today in the Gallery, alongside his wife Karen and his daughter Gracie. John developed sepsis in 2024. After first believing he was suffering with muscle pain, the situation rapidly deteriorated, resulting in hospital admission with heart attack-like symptoms and his lips turning blue. John and Karen were not aware at this point that John had many of the signs of sepsis. Within hours, his kidneys had shut down, needing dialysis, and his body went into septic shock with doctors putting him into an induced coma. It was unclear if John would survive, and the coma lasted for two weeks, during which time John was transferred from Darent Valley hospital in Dartford up to St Thomas’s just across the river from where we are now.

After a month, thankfully, John pulled through. But this good news was accompanied by the desperately difficult decision from his doctors that he needed to have a quadruple amputation. He has received amazing support from the Dartford community, which has rallied round to help fund support for his family. A special mention must go to the wonderful Dartford working men’s club, led by the amazing Nick Byram. The club not only held fundraisers for the family but has held sepsis awareness events to ensure that more people know the symptoms.

Notwithstanding this great community effort, there remains so much to do to improve post-infection support for people like John. I have been privileged to have kept in touch with John and Karen during John’s exceptionally brave recovery journey. When we met in July, he told me of the exceptionally long delay he was experiencing in receiving his new prosthetic hand. John was cast for the prosthetic at the end of last year, but due to issues relating to the move of his local prosthetic centre, it was not assembled, leaving him worried that his body may change and the prosthetic would not fit. The challenges that causes are compounded by the fact that he cannot have the casting for the second prosthetic hand until he has had the first one for a year—a timer that has not yet been able to start. John has also experienced delays and dysfunctions with his facial surgery, which he is currently undergoing with the support of surgeons and doctors.

John’s case illustrates how much we have to do to spread knowledge about sepsis and to improve care for those who have it. As others have done, I commend the campaigning work of Lord Mackinlay of Richborough, who has not only helped to raise awareness of sepsis in our health system, but has met John and provided encouragement to him in his recovery journey.

[Vikki Slade]

I too pay tribute to Lord Mackinlay because when Hamish’s story made the papers, he did not hesitate to visit Hamish, an 18-year-old, and help him through his recovery. When I first met Lord Mackinlay myself in Buckingham Palace when we had just been elected, I went to him and said, “What a hero. What an incredible man to do that every time a similar case happens.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

I start by declaring my interest as an NHS consultant paediatrician, a member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, a member of the British Medical Association and a mother of three children.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire (Mike Wood) on securing this debate, alongside the hon. Members for Dartford (Jim Dickson) and for Ashfield (Lee Anderson). In particular, I thank my hon. Friend for his speech, which was hugely moving. I cannot believe that it has been such a long time since his illness happened, but it is great to see him looking so well today. I express my condolences to the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) and thank her for the brave speech that she gave.

I remember sitting in this Chamber a little over two years ago—I am sure you were there too, Madam Deputy Speaker—when the then Member for South Thanet, now Lord Mackinlay, received a rare standing ovation from the House and from the Gallery as he returned to Parliament following his remarkable recovery from sepsis. His journey has been incredible, and his story has brought renewed attention to a disease that kills nearly 50,000 people every year. For context, that is around the same number of people who die from bowel, breast and prostate cancer combined. However, with attention to prevention, early identification of infection, early diagnosis, better treatments and the avoidance of antimicrobial resistance, we can reduce that number and save people’s lives.

As I said, raising awareness of sepsis and how suddenly it can change someone’s condition is vital, and the previous Conservative Government got the ball rolling in that regard. My right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) adopted the UK Sepsis Trust’s “Just ask ‘Could it be sepsis?’” campaign in 2016 when he was Health Secretary. The Conservatives also backed sepsis research with more than £1 billion through the National Institute for Health and Care Research. Research is important, because it will help us to improve diagnosis and treatment and to better understand why some people get an infection and it makes them a little bit ill, but some people get an infection and it turns into sepsis.

That was a good start, but of course, as always with medicine, there is more to do, and it was pleasing to see the previous Starmer Government build on this work by introducing the modern service framework for sepsis. We have modern service frameworks for other diseases, and it seems good to have one for sepsis specifically. The guiding light of this framework is the Government’s ambition to reduce sepsis deaths by 25% by 2035, with which I think we could all agree. But simply saying it will not deliver it; it has to have a plan, and the plan has to be deliverable and funded. What funding have the Government committed to implement that framework?

As we know, early diagnosis is paramount, but sepsis is notoriously difficult to diagnose and very rapid. I remember seeing a patient whose mum had got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom—not something she did normally, and she was not quite sure why she had on that particular night—and when she was walking back along the landing, she thought, “It’s a bit cold—I’ll just check.” She checked her son had his blankets on and was warm, but as she did so, just in the light from the landing she spotted a little mark on the little boy’s leg. She turned the light on, and saw that he was developing the rash, which does not blanch, that goes with meningococcal sepsis. She brought him in, and he survived and he went home well, but I shudder to think what would have happened if she had waited till she woke up routinely at 7 o’clock in the morning. So someone was watching to make sure he was safe, and I am so glad that was the case, but it is so very rapid, as others hon. Members have testified.

There is no single test. There is no single thing we can monitor or measure that helps. Flu-like symptoms mimic many other common illnesses, and on top of that, as we have heard, diagnosis and treatment are absolutely time-critical. The UK Sepsis Trust has developed the sepsis six—oxygen, cultures, antibiotics, fluids, lactate management and urinary output monitoring—and all these should be carried out within the first hour. The Government’s MSF commits to rapid diagnostic tools and more advanced genomic sequencing. What infrastructure and workforce investment is required by the Government to set this up, and over what timeframe do they envisage that it will be achieved?

Talking about the workforce, the Government decided to ditch the previous Government’s NHS workforce plan to create their own, which is of course their right. However, their replacement was originally due to be published in early 2025 and was most recently promised as “imminent” just before the summer recess, but we are now well into September 2026 and there is still no plan. The Minister in the other place was asked for more details about the workforce plan, but her written answer simply stated that the Government

“will provide an update on the 10 Year Workforce Plan in due course.”

Could the Minister please update us on when this plan is going to be published, preferably with a date rather than an expression of “soon” or “imminent”?

I want to mention group B streptococcal infection, which I have seen in paediatric practice, particularly in babies. It is a common bacteria that lives harmlessly in the gut or lower reproductive tract, but there is a risk that it can enter the bloodstream, causing neonatal sepsis when passed to newborns. The GBS3 trial is looking to prevent and reduce the impact of group B strep, and the Government’s framework commits to supporting that. Could the Minister tell us more about how the Government plan to do that?

I also want to talk about prevention, which the Government have said is one of their big shifts in medicine. Some sepsis can be prevented or reduced, and research has shown that, for example, if ibuprofen is given to children with chickenpox, it increases the likelihood of their developing sepsis. We know that completing the antibiotic course is important. We also know that handwashing technique is important, and that keeping things clean is important, particularly in preventing the sepsis that is acquired in hospitals. Management of chronic disease reduces the risk, too, and then there is vaccination.

Meningitis B is possibly one of the most scary infections and conditions that one sees as a doctor, because it progresses so quickly—and it can cause brain damage, amputations and death—but there is a highly effective vaccine, which was introduced for infants born from the middle of 2015 onwards. However, as the outbreak in Kent, Dorset and Berkshire showed last year, when three young people died, it can still come back in older children. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation met in July 2026 and suggested an increase in the vaccination schedule for those young people. It recommended that young children who had had one dose of vaccine should have another at age 15; that those who had not had the vaccine should have two doses; and that older people starting university should have a catch-up.

Very shortly, it will be freshers week, and around 580,000 young people will head off to university for the first time with great excitement. University students are seven times more likely to get invasive meningococcal sepsis than people who do not go to university, and the Government have only managed to vaccinate 246,000 of those young people—something that the UK Health Security Agency issued a document about last week. It said that last year, 97% of invasive meningococcal disease in 15 to 24-year-olds was caused by meningitis B, so I will ask the Minister some questions that I asked her during last week’s vaccine debate and have not yet received an answer to. When is she going to review and respond to the requests for vaccines for younger children who have not had them yet—the doses at 15 and the two doses for those who have not had a dose yet? What is she doing to increase awareness among people starting university in the next week or so?

[Vikki Slade]

I am really grateful to the shadow Minister for raising this issue, which I also raised earlier in the debate. My son George and his girlfriend Maisie both had their two doses in the past few weeks as they turned 18, but my constituent Victoria asked me to write to the Minister a few months ago about education and awareness. I was really disappointed that the Department for Education did not think it was necessary to add meningitis awareness into the personal, social, health and economic education programme in secondary school. Will the shadow Minister support me in advocating for that?

[Dr Johnson]

It is clearly important that young people are aware of the signs of infection, particularly such a serious infection, so I agree with the hon. Member about that.

I am interested in what the Minister is doing to try to prevent these infections by ensuring that the right people have the right vaccines. The Government are changing the way in which vaccines are being commissioned from NHS England, which they are abolishing. [Interruption.] Madam Deputy Speaker seems to have a cough, so I will finish my speech. The integrated care boards are going to be responsible for vaccinations. How is that change going to impact vaccines, particularly for students who live in one place and go to university in another?

To sum up, the Government’s ambition to reduce sepsis and sepsis deaths should be welcomed, and it is good to have the modern service framework in place. However, I am sure that charities such as the UK Sepsis Trust and families affected by sepsis would be most grateful if the Minister could provide further clarity on the Government’s road map and the funding required to reach this important destination.