Georgina McNamara, the UKST’s Executive Lead Nurse for Education and one of the Trust’s founders, conducts in-house training sessions on recognising the signs and symptoms of sepsis, principally for groups of health professionals. She explained, "The problem that my UKST colleagues and I face is that an increasing number of people want you to tell them about sepsis and how to combat it effectively – but we all have full-time jobs in the health service. To meet this growing need, we realised that we needed to produce eLearning materials that deal with sepsis and the issues that it raises."

Knowing that eLearning materials need a platform – or a learning-management system (LMS) – to contain, distribute, and manage them, as well as monitor their usage, Georgina chose the Create eLearning mobile-friendly eLearning portal, which allows users to build, host, deliver, and track eLearning, as well as unite all their online training and coaching. Create eLearning’s LMS can be accessed in the cloud, offline, and off-grid – and it’s SCORM compliant.

"While it’s taken us a while to produce the eLearning materials themselves, Carol-Ann Stevenson and her team at Create eLearning have always been extremely supportive and helpful," said Georgina. "They’ve done everything we’ve asked of them – often going above and beyond the requirements of our contract."

Currently, there is a "major" eLearning programme on sepsis available for health professionals and a series of short modules, known as "Sepsis Savvy", for both the public and health professionals. These Sepsis Savvy modules were launched at an event in London’s Portcullis House in April 2016 to an audience that included members of both Houses of the UK Parliament.

Many centres throughout the world have now adopted the Sepsis Six, which has been associated with decreased mortality, decreased length of stay in hospital, and fewer intensive-care bed days.

Georgina revealed that the UKST plans to produce eLearning materials covering all medical aspects of sepsis – as it affects gynaecology, obstetrics, paediatrics, emergency medicine, critical care, community care, pre-hospital care, walk-in clinics, paramedics, and general practitioners.

Georgina continued, "At the moment we have capacity to cater for 500 users on the Create eLearning platform – and these places are being rapidly taken up. Of course, these are very early days, and given the increasing demand for UKST’s services, especially from healthcare professionals around the country, we’ve already put in place options to grow that capacity in increments of 500 users.

"We expect the demand for our online learning materials to grow – for example, from nurses who need to revalidate and who will therefore need to update their competency in such issues as sepsis. Ultimately we’d like to see recognition of sepsis become part of mandatory training for all health professionals.

"Moreover, by making these learning materials available online – via any delivery device – it means that they can be accessed at any time of the day or night. This should help health professionals who may have time to study at any time during their shifts."