Senator Aubrey McCarthy
Credit: Annie Thompson

The Patient Safety (Right to Escalation and Clinical Review) Bill 2025 provides for a statutory right for patients, family members and carers to request an urgent clinical review where serious deterioration in a patient’s condition is suspected. It also requires hospitals to operate 24-hour critical review systems and sepsis and deterioration protocols.

The Bill comes following the role out of ‘Martha’s Rule’ in NHS England. Named for 13 year old Martha Mills, who died in 2021 after developing sepsis in hospital having initially been admitted for a pancreatic injury after falling off her bike, it gives patients, families and carers the right to request a rapid review if they are worried that a patient’s condition is getting worse and their concerns are not being responded to.

Speaking in the Seanad chamber, Senator McCarthy said, “we’re seeing more and more sepsis in older populations and there are few effective drugs to treat it. The idea is to see sepsis as a medical emergency. Where time is absolutely of the essence.”

Mr McCarthy continued: “What the statistics show is that sepsis is one of the leading causes of preventable death in the healthcare systems around the world. And the tragedy is that many patients show warning signs long before they become critically ill. And so this Bill is ensuring that protocols are in place and are acted upon immediately, and that will give patients, families and staff statutory rights to trigger an urgent critical review.”

“And the legislation goes beyond creating rights, it requires every hospital to maintain a 24-hour critical review teams that would implement sepsis response protocol. So the objective leaders is very simple, regardless of where a patient presents in Ireland, there should be a clear pathway for recognising, sepsis quickly and responding without delay. So, every family who has lost a loved one, the people who have been in here to give evidence they have said that if intervention ever happened it could have saved lives.”

Mr McCarthy concluded by saying his Bill, “seeks to ensure that when warning signs appear, voices are heard, reviews are triggered, and action is taken. So, it’s about turning lessons learned from tragedy into a system that gives every patient the best possible chance of survival.”