One in four hospital trusts are failing to give lifesaving sepsis drugs to half of patients in time, despite the latest NHS guidelines.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said patients were still dying needlessly, but insisted the NHS had made ‘significant progress’.
Fresh guidelines were recently introduced to help diagnose the killer condition, which is notoriously difficult to spot until it has spread throughout the body.
Under revised NHS rules, anyone showing signs of the illness should be assessed and treated within 60 minutes of arriving at hospital.
Yet NHS England figures, revealed on BBC’s Panorama tonight, show that 24 out of 104 acute hospital trusts failed to administer intravenous antibiotics within an hour to half the patients considered to need the treatment.
