Growing calls for more awareness on sepsis
'Sepsis' is the leading cause of preventable deaths in Queensland children, higher than youth suicide, road accidents, and drownings. But many people aren’t aware of what it is. Now a new Queensland study has found dozens of children who died of sepsis outside of hospital had been in contact with a health professional in the 24 hours beforehand and were not identified as being seriously ill.
Transcript
00:00 George loved to dance and just the way he looked at you was like reaching into your
00:07 soul and giving you the biggest hug.
00:14 These are some of the last treasured videos of George Barber-Coomer. Four years ago the
00:19 little boy was taken to hospital with gastro. It turned into a battle with sepsis and within
00:25 days the three year old was dead.
00:27 I had to make a really hard decision and take responsibility for saying it was okay to turn
00:34 his life support off and say goodbye to my beautiful boy.
00:42 Sepsis is an overwhelming and life threatening response to an infection and is the leading
00:47 cause of preventable deaths in Queensland children, higher than road accidents and drownings.
00:53 But public awareness can still be poor.
00:56 The knowledge is really out of keeping compared to other conditions.
01:00 In what's believed to be an international first study, researchers analysed 748 sepsis
01:06 related child deaths in Queensland across 18 years. Nearly 30% of paediatric deaths
01:13 occurred at home or in the community, frequently among children with no underlying medical
01:18 conditions.
01:19 That really blew me away and it's shown us we now have a whole area of new focus that
01:25 we need to be concentrating on.
01:27 Dozens of the children had seen a health professional in the 24 hours prior to death. In most cases
01:33 the child wasn't identified as being seriously ill.
01:37 Many of the parents that I've talked to where the children have had sepsis have been really
01:41 very reassured by the fact that a doctor thought that they were okay 24 hours ago and how could
01:47 this have happened?
01:48 Symptoms include laboured breathing, mottled skin and unexplained pain.
01:53 So don't be afraid to say, 'Look, this isn't how my child normally behaves. Can you look
02:00 further at this? Or could it be sepsis?'
02:03 .
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