The Centre for International Child Health (CICH) at the BC Children’s Hospital and the Global Sepsis Alliance (GSA) commit to reduce the burden of sepsis on children under five living in low and middle income countries. Education and advocacy, led by GSA, will be international in scope and includes annual World Sepsis Day events every September 13. GSA will also spearhead new education, collaboration and research initiatives related to the May 2017 adoption of the World Health Assembly resolution to improve, prevent, diagnose, and manage sepsis.
Capacity building and prevention efforts, led by CICH, will centre on a CAD $1.3 million three-year commitment to continue work in rural Uganda to identify children who are at risk of dying from infection and develop scalable, evidence-based interventions to prevent these deaths. So far, CICH has found five simple and easy-to-measure parameters that can identify children at high risk. By tracking these parameters using a mobile phone application, health care workers can identify high-risk children and provide additional post-discharge support, such as referrals for visits with community health workers. CICH is now coordinating a large study involving 8,700 children to further validate and develop the program. By 2020, CICH’s work on a program of Smart Discharges will achieve the following goals: (1) improve the identification of children at high risk of relapse and death following sepsis; (2) improve the discharge process so that 100% of children identified as high risk receive additional support at discharge; (3) triple post discharge health-seeking behaviour and health care system use by high-risk children; and ultimately (4) reduce post-discharge mortality by as much as 30% in highrisk children. When rolled out across Uganda, Smart Discharges will save tens of thousands of lives yearly.
