Professor Brendan Smith and his team developed the idea of using a non-invasive piece of scanning technology known as an Ultra Sonic Cardio Output Monitor (USCOM) to test whether a patient is suffering from septic shock (blood poisoning) in its earliest stages.

Professor Smith said the practice has cut the mortality rate from sepsis by 45 per cent.

To put that in perspective the discovery of penicillin cut the mortality rate from pneumonia by 28 per cent.

The technique was used for the first time in the world here in Bathurst. Several months later it was trialled in London.

Now Professor Smith and his team, which includes Veronica Madigan from Charles Sturt University, Dr John Williams and Dr Graham Pickford from Bathurst Base and Uscom CEO Rob Phillips, now travel the globe teaching their diagnostic techniques in some of the world’s top hospitals in Asia, Italy, the UK and the United Stated.

Professor Smith said the nurses at Bathurst Base Hospital have also played a huge role in the technology’s success by making sure it used at the earliest opportunity when a patient presents.

“They are very proud of it, and bloody right too,” he said.

“It’s like the Cowra Magpies beating the Melbourne Storm. This little hospital in NSW is putting most of the big hospitals in the world to shame.”

Professor Smith said it had been suspected for some time that if septic shock could be identified in its early stages the patient had a chance of surviving it.

“If not, you could kiss your butt goodbye,” he said.

The problem was, there was no way of proving it.

Up until five or six years ago the only way to determine that a person was septic was by running cardiac catheters through a hole in the neck down into a vein, through the heart and into the lungs.

“That procedure was dangerous so it was not something you were going to do lightly or early on when you just suspected there was an infection,” Professor Smith said.

That is where USCOM changed everything. Professor Smith said there are certain fingerprints which show up in the way the circulation behaves that indicates septic shock.

When the equipment arrived at Bathurst Base about six years ago he looked at it and wondered.

“Some of the very earliest signs are that the circulation begins to go out of control,” Professor Smith said.

“We realised with this piece of equipment we could spot this very early on in a way that was non invasive and perfectly safe.

“It provided us with a way of putting the fire out with a bucket before it became an inferno.”

USCOM uses doppler technology like a police radar. It allows medical staff to look from the neck or the side of the chest to the heart to measure the speed of blood flow.

When sepsis is present in adults the blood flow is much faster than normal and in children it tends to be slower up until the child reaches about the age of seven when it speeds up.

“Even when symptoms are very mild we can measure them and pick it up long before it takes hold,” Professor Smith said.

During her research Ms Madigan found a study done in a big Detroit hospital which showed that if sepsis is identified and treated in the first eight hours the patient has a much better chance of survival.

Professor Smith said staff at Bathurst Base are now so well trained in looking for septic shock they catch 80 per cent of cases in under an hour and 90 per cent within an hour and a half.

And because the device is mobile staff can go to the patient before they become so sick they are admitted to Intensive Care.

Professor Smith said Bathurst Base Hospital sees about 80 cases of septic shock a year.

Five years ago the mortality rate was just under 50 per cent. Now it is just over 5 per cent.

Professor Smith said any infection at all can cause septic shock - a skin infection, an abscess, a urinary tract infection, a respiratory infection. In fact 90 per cent of cases stem from ordinary, every day things.

The number of cases in the Western world is increasing by around five per cent a year as diabetes increases, and resistance to antibiotics decreases through overuse.

Professor Smith said he had begun to suspect there were a few things in the standard treatment of septic shock that were wrong.

However, you can’t change standard treatment unless you have the data to prove it is wrong.

He said with the introduction of USCOM staff could for the first time scientifically measure what was going on.

“If you go back five or six years the standard teaching was to give lots of intravenous fluid,” Professor Smith said.

“We thought that was wrong because patients seemed to get worse. We also knew that if too much fluid is put into people it leads to heart failure,” he said.

The trials have shown this to be true and the amount of fluids given to sepsis patients has been reduced.

Professor Smith said, oddly, the work Bathurst has been doing in this area has been far more widely accepted overseas than in Australia.

However, much to his delight NSW Health has now started rolling out the Sepsis Pathway, taking the strategies developed at Bathurst Base Hospital for the treatment of sepsis, and making them compulsory across the state.

“They were trialled and are working so well this medical innovation is now compulsory in every hospital in NSW,” Professor Smith said.

“It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it saves them a fortune. To us it seems incredibly simple, but that’s the beauty of it. People will actually do it.

“It means that across NSW the lives of 8000 people per year will be saved.

“As health initiatives go that is pretty bloody impressive,” he said.