On Tuesday 30 January ICHP hosted a ‘National Sepsis Workshop: Using Data to Improve Outcomes for Sepsis Patients’. It achieved the first steps in helping ICHP and our health partners to use data more intelligently to produce better outcome for our sepsis (‘infection with badness’) patients. There were delegates representing NHS England, NHS Improvement, NHS Resolution, and CQC.
“ICHP’s breadth have enabled us to be together and spark conversations across boundaries, partnerships like these are critical for future key conversations and vital in what we do.”
The packed agenda for the day included topics on ‘Why is sepsis hard to measure?’ From Kate Cheema, Head of Patient Safety Measurement Unit and the National Patient Safety Collaborative, who explored with the group the size of the problem, challenges with measurements and collaborations on Sepsis.
Matt Inada-Kim, Consultant in Acute & General Medicine, Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, lead a working session on mapping the current use of data in the Sepsis pathway, introducing the Suspicion of Sepsis (SoS) code and highlighting the strengths and weakness’ of current tools and methods.
Representatives from ICHP, Julia Wilkins Senior Business Analytics Adviser, gave examples of current dashboards and approaches to Sepsis data applications and, Andi Orlowski Head of Business Intelligence, introduced Validation through retrogressive (Bow Tie) Analysis. Andi described how the Bow Tie analysis will help understanding of which patients are most likely to develop sepsis. The analysis will be used to track sepsis patients back over time to understand the factors that are common to patients with poorer outcomes. The analysis could elicit the reason that these patients were in were in hospital, and the events that led them to develop sepsis e.g. previous procedures. This analysis will help inform Trusts about the types of patients locally that most common develop sepsis.
Dr Anne Kinderlerer Consultant Rheumatologist and Sepsis Clinical Lead Imperial College Healthcare Trust presented on specifying data requirements in different settings including how data can be used to improve care, influence clinical decisions, and how we can build upon and improve retrogressive analysis.
Kenny Ajayi, Programme Lead for Patient Safety at ICHP, brought the energised day to a close reflecting on how this work will be taken further, emphasising the need to identify others who need to be involved, how the dashboards can be trailed and how future workshops can be best utilised.
“I’ve come away with a new vigour; I share the sense of enthusiasm and determination to fight ‘infection with badness’ more intelligently knowing that there is a whole group of us working together for the same goal.”
