Aim: To improve sepsis recognition, response and referral in the OOH period using the NHS NEWS app.
Sepsis kills 37,000 people a year in the UK1. It can be difficult to recognise and early treatment has shown to improve survival. Sepsis 6 is a recent example of a hospital based care bundle approach that has been proven to reduce mortality. There are a number of different early warning scoring systems available such as MEWS, NEWS, PREAMBLE, and the Sepsis Toolkit. This can make it difficult for the primary care physician to standardise the quality of patient care. We sought to establish a small workgroup of GPs to use a single, national and validated scoring system – NEWS. This has been validated for use in the pre-hospital setting2 . We used PDSA cycles of change to establish a working guidance plan for using the system in practice.
