Contribution
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire (Mike Wood) for so vividly highlighting his personal experience of sepsis. He gave a very emotional speech and it is good to see him in the Chamber looking so healthy.
Around one in five deaths worldwide are associated with sepsis—that is 11 million deaths a year. I recently met Ron Daniels, founder and chief medical officer of the UK Sepsis Trust, to discuss the new sepsis modern service framework. I very much welcome its ambition to reduce deaths, life-threatening complications and the long-term impact of sepsis by at least 25% over the next decade, but if we are serious about achieving that, we need to get much better at detecting infection early.
Sepsis is the body’s extreme response to infection, whether viral, bacterial or fungal. It can cause organ failure, permanent disability and death. Crucially, patients can deteriorate incredibly quickly. There is no single diagnostic test for sepsis; its symptoms overlap with many other conditions and clinicians are often having to make decisions with incomplete information. That is why rapid diagnostic tests are so important. I recently held a meeting at Winchester hospital for local GPs, the local authority, laboratories and manufacturers of various rapid diagnostic tests to look at the barriers to implementing rapid diagnostic tests, and at how people can have them in the community for earlier diagnosis and the prevention of hospital admissions.
Better diagnostics mean earlier treatment. They mean being able to use the right antibiotic for the right infection; they mean preventing patients deteriorating into sepsis; and they mean using fewer unnecessary antibiotics, which ultimately can result in antimicrobial resistance developing and is another huge growing public health concern.
Prevention matters too. We must reverse the falling vaccination rates that we have seen in recent years to prevent infections occurring in the first place, as well as ensuring that hospitals have the facilities to isolate and care properly for infectious patients. Crucially, it also means tackling corridor care and long waits in A&E, because when somebody is deteriorating in those conditions, every hour matters, as we know. In the case of corridor care and long waits, that means that diagnosis and treatment is more likely to be delayed.
I wish to talk specifically about one group of patients—cancer patients. We rightly focus on treating the cancer itself, but infection, often sepsis, is the second-biggest cause of death for people with cancer. That may seem surprising, but cancer can cause a reduction in people’s immunity. Chemotherapy and various treatments cause people to become immunocompromised, weakening their immune system and making them more prone to getting infections. That also means repeat infections, which means that they are more likely to have repeat uses of antibiotics and to have antibiotic-resistant infections.
The consequences of infection for people with cancer can be even more serious. That is why I find one omission from the Government’s national cancer plan quite striking. It is an 86-page strategy setting out how we are going to transform cancer care by 2035, yet infection is mentioned only once, and that is just in the foreword. That is not a minor oversight; it is a glaring omission that risks undermining the entire cancer strategy. We would never produce a cancer strategy that treated radiotherapy, chemotherapy or surgery as peripheral to cancer care, so we need to ensure that we are treating infection, which is the second-biggest killer of cancer patients, as integral to cancer care. Infection prevention, rapid diagnostics, antimicrobial stewardship and surveillance need to be absolutely central to cancer care, not an afterthought. If we fail to address infection properly, we are setting the entire new cancer strategy up to fail.
Sepsis contributes to tens of thousands of deaths in the UK each year, as well as leaving many survivors with life-changing physical and psychological consequences. I have one specific request of the Government. Will the Minister commit to updating the national cancer strategy to incorporate infection control, sepsis and rapid diagnostic tests as being absolutely integral to cancer management? We welcome the new sepsis modern service framework; we just need to deliver it.