Suspected sepsis to be treated as emergency

Suspected sepsis in patients should be treated as an emergency in the same way as heart attacks are, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) says.

New guidance from the health watchdog strongly recommends that medics should begin to consider sepsis when treating any patients unwell with infections at an early stage.

Sepsis can lead to severe organ failure, shock and death if not treated early enough. It is believed that it causes nearly 44,000 deaths a year in the UK alone, of which between 5,000 and 13,000 are preventable with early diagnosis and treatment.

In the guidance, NICE acknowledges that the problem, caused by the immune system overreacting to infection, can be hard to diagnose due to its vague nature. It can be mild to begin with, and initial symptoms can be ambiguous, such as rapid breathing.

Therefore, it urges medical staff to consider it from the outset when someone is unwell with infection, the same way heart attacks are considered for chest pains.

Professor Mark Baker, from NICE, told the BBC: "The problem with those patients who died unnecessarily of sepsis is that staff did not think about it soon enough.

"It requires a depth of thought and experience and a way of examining patients which isn't always there - particularly because of time pressures and partly because we have got used to implementing guidelines without thinking."