Aim
To co-design a roadmap for sustainable, innovative and evidence-informed paediatric sepsis care.
Background
Sustainability is a key focus for all activities of the QPSP. Stakeholder feedback and data provided to QPSP throughout the duration of the program reflect concerns about sustainability, particularly in relation to embedding the use of the pathway into clinical practice, improving sepsis management, family experience and outcomes, and improving health service efficiency and effectiveness.
The QPSP has secured recurrent funding for a multidisciplinary team, however the capacity and authority is lacking to provide continual bespoke and intensive support for each HHS.
Outcomes
QPSP created a 5-year roadmap to tackle sustainability issues with clear, measurable and achievable actions which strive for the quadruple aim to produce value-based health service improvements.
Our Peer Mentor Program provides support to families across Queensland who have a child diagnosed with sepsis, or are bereaved as a result of sepsis, by linking them with a mentor who has a lived experience of having had a child with sepsis more than two years ago. As directed by our consumers, we offer separate mentoring support for families of children who have survived their sepsis and families who are bereaved by sepsis.
Digital Storytellers were engaged to facilitate a story-led consultation, engaging participants language, sensory and emotive brains to draw out rich qualitative data.ackground
Sepsis is a leading cause of preventable death and disability in children.
Sepsis, in technical terms, is life-threatening organ dysfunction due to dysregulated host response to infection. So when your body, in its attempts to fight off an infection - such as gastro, the flu, or one from an injury - starts to injure and shut-down its own organs. More than half of sepsis cases worldwide occur in children, with an estimated 25 million cases of paediatric sepsis in 2017, of whom 3.4 million children died, and almost all were left with a broad spectrum of physical, cognitive and psychosocial impacts.
While the figures and physical impacts of paediatric sepsis were known, the available research and support networks, focusing on the unique holistic experiences of families impacted by paediatric sepsis and what their specific support needs were, did not reflect this. It simply did not exist.
This clearly identified a critical gap in both knowledge and services in providing holistic family centred care for these families.
