Anger at daughter’s sepsis death fuels my campaign

Jason Watkins, a British actor, has urged A&E units to look again at procedures surrounding infants as he has channels his anger at his young daughter’s death from sepsis into trying to “improve the system”.

The actor said that his fury at the death of Maude aged two on New Year’s Day 2011 led him to smash up his shower.

“It wasn’t anger at any individual, it was anger at fate. Why should we deserve this?” he told Andy Coulson’s Crisis What Crisis? podcast.

“You feel really vulnerable and there’s a sort of rage against that. And there are all these different ways of resolving and wrestling out of this horrible dark pit that you’re in."

He now campaigns for the UK Sepsis Trust.

“I was never angry at any individual,” he said. “My anger was fuelled into trying to work out better ways of dealing with sepsis, or even more than that, the way that we look at infants in A&E. Because you know, it’s a funding issue, it’s an organisational issue. It’s another conversation.

“Because I had identified that there wasn’t an individual at fault in the hospital, it has to be the system. So we’ve got to improve it. My anger is fuelled into that. There’s no bitterness. Nobody made a technical mistake, it’s just nobody really thought of the possibilities of what could be happening.

“For me the whole of looking at infants arriving at A&E needs to be looked at again. Because if I say that Maude died twelve years ago, and that the ombudsman report about sepsis a couple of months ago said that nothing had changed about sepsis, now, that was like a body-blow, that makes me feel sick even thinking about it now, because we’ve worked so hard over that time.”

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Source: The Times, 1 February 2024