Sepsis deaths in hospitals.

There's a myriad of bacteria that live harmlessly on our skin, in our digestive and upper respiratory tract. These same bacteria can cause life threatening diseases - from pneumonia to meningitis to necrotising fasciitis.

One third of people have MRSA - the 'super bug' living harmlessly in their nose.

Might have been a handover if it was 12 of them.

I don't think we can blame the recent case in Limerick purely on the normal HSE shambles.

The staff treated the girl absolutely awful outside of not responding correctly. Also both the doctor involved and the lead nurse have conveniently left the jurisdiction.

There were 66 other patients triaged to the same level as Aoife that day 'catagory 2' who waited over 10 hours to be seen by a doctor when the target is 15 minutes. The department was severely understaffed both in a nursing and medical capacity.

The clinical nurse manager deemed the department to be 'alarming unsafe' and escalated this opinion to management. Nothing happened.

It's all very well drawing up a sepsis protocol, but if you don't have enough staff and resources to actually see patients, nothing will change. The HSE and hospital management can hide behind the fact that they have a protocol, and the staff on the day will be hung out to dry. C'est la vie.

Oh there's more to come out from there and it's not just sepsis, some terrible medical misadventures. It's our nearest hospital, people have a genuine and well founded fear of the place.

Sepsis is serious though, it's the 1st thing you should suspect, if you end up being wrong that's a good thing.

Indeed. While overcrowding was a factor, I don't think it was the sole factor.

People didn't vote to legalise abortion in a bid to eliminate sepsis. Maybe in your head that's the only way you can fathom so many people supporting it (you said you voted no) but you're wrong.

It's coming up to six years now and there was no doubt about the result. You don't have to have an abortion but an overwhelming majority of people voted to have the choice.

The Savita case brought abortion back into the limelight in the saddest way possible but it wasn't some Trojan horse used to trick people into supporting abortion. People felt strongly abot the topic for a long time before that.

my mother used to refer to us as children of getting Blood Poisoning. It was in relation to getting a cut from a dirty source. Eh a dirty/rusty nail, getting snagged from a dirty piece of iron. Etc . Would she have been referring to getting sepsis without she knowing it?

Yes, Sepsis isn't a new thing just the term sepsis is used more frequently. Before the advent of antibiotics, ultimately sepsis would have been the most common cause of death by far. Usually either from an infected wound or where an infection such as tooth, UTI, Pneumonia etc spread to the bloodstream.

The problem I see in some hospitals is due to the lack of resources and inadequate systems for streaming healthcare in general, the number of people attending A&E results in "some" staff having a bias towards diagnosing the simple easy to deal with option rather than the complex time consuming option when faced with symptoms that could be explained by either. Their goal is to clear patients as quick as possible and so see the easier option more readily. Its human nature and takes training and systems to overcome

It’s true that blood poisoning is another name for septicaemia/sepsis, but what I remember my mother calling blood poisoning (exactly what you describe) wasn’t full blown sepsis because I never had a fever or felt unwell with it.

I suspect that the explanation is that back then, there was almost no bacterial resistance to antibiotics, so that careful cleaning and disinfection was usually sufficient, and when it wasn’t, then the penicillin you’d get from the doctor as a second line of treatment was enough to fix your incipient blood poisoning.

IOW I think the present problem is greatly exacerbated by bacterial resistance to antibiotics. We had an absolute wonder drug and we carelessly wasted it.

Probably she was worried about tetanus aka lockjaw, which is a different disease.

Most people are now vaccinated as children, and people in at risk jobs get boosters as adults, so there's a lot less of it. But it was a big problem in my parents generation.

And of course other countries don't have old people or people with cancer.