As many of us start to prepare for the festive season and the summer break, we felt now was the right time to share some exciting news with you all, as we wrap up 2025 and look ahead to a new year.
Working with Māori and Pasifika
Five community wānanga were held with Māori and Pasifika health providers in Waikato in October, thanks to funding from Te Niwha.
The objective of the wānanga being to raise sepsis awareness and co-create culturally relevant strategies to strengthen responses to sepsis.
The key themes discussed over the few days were the importance of clear messaging, building relationships with trusted health providers, sharing real-life stories, and integrating sepsis education into community and clinical training.
A huge shout-out to sepsis survivor Bennett Pomana who helped lead the wānanga and then presented a summary of the results at Te Niwha’s Infectious Diseases Summit in November with our co-founder Dr Paul Huggan. By all accounts it was a very powerful presentation, which has gone some way in making a meaningful step change in this space.
Sepsis Trust NZ meeting with Minister of Health
We are delighted to share that on 4 December, Sepsis Trust NZ met with the Minister of Health, Simeon Brown MP, as we continue our efforts to advocate for better sepsis recognition and treatment in Aotearoa New Zealand.
We asked that he consider implementing a National Action Plan for Sepsis, as per the World Health Organisation’s recommendation that all United Nations member countries have one in place by 2030.
We also asked that he consider providing Health New Zealand - Te Whatu Ora with the necessary resources to fully implement the new hospital sepsis package, developed by Te Tāhū Hauora Health Quality & Safety Commission.
We also asked that he consider supporting our Trust as we seek ways to increase the level of support we can offer to our survivor and family network, and to boost our awareness efforts amongst the public.
We are sure many of you will realise how incredibly difficult it is to be granted an in-person meeting like this, and how much preparation goes into it.
We are very grateful to Minister Brown and his team for being so generous with his time, and appreciate his thoughtful and relevant questions of us.
We now await the outcome of discussions he now intends to have with Health New Zealand - Te Whatu Ora and look forward to sharing this with you all next year.
Share your story with us
We are so grateful to those of you who’ve reached out to the Trust to share your story of sepsis with us. We know that real accounts from real people are what really help us to gain media interest, and to attract attention from potential funders. They also help us hugely in our education efforts within the healthcare sector.
What we really need therefore is to build a real bank of stories, photos and videos from you, so you will see we have added a new page on our website for you to fill out a brief form telling us your sepsis story.
We know that this can be really helpful for you in terms of your own healing and unpacking the sepsis journey you have been on, but also it is so valuable to us to be able to use these for our own material or for media purposes to help us raise awareness of sepsis in Aotearoa New Zealand.
So even if you’ve already emailed us in the past, we’d be really grateful if you could please fill out this new Share your Story form, so we can make sure it’s all safely in one place. Many of you have specifically asked us to share your story publicly so this is now our plan to do this for 2026.
Thank you in advance for your time and willingness to support our advocacy efforts.
Click here to share your story with us.
Executive leadership change at the Trust
Whilst we hope many of you will be planning a break over the summer, for us it’s full steam ahead! We are marking a change of executive leadership at the Trust with our previous Communications and Engagement Director, Ally Hossain, now moving into the role of CEO. Michelle Crook is taking on a new role in Strategy and Governance for the Trust as a special project for the first quarter of 2026, to help us refresh and revitalise for the work ahead
We are also delighted to announce Carol Goldie-Anderson has joined the team as our Survivor Support and Connection Facebook Moderator. Carol is a support and education specialist in the field of change, loss and grief. She has spent the last 30 years facilitating programmes and groups with people seeking support following life-changing events.
As a sepsis survivor herself, Carol has firsthand experience in the recovery journey, and now brings her skills, understanding and knowledge to this newly enhanced role. Her focus is on fostering conversations and outreach with sepsis survivors and whānau, and she looks forward to connecting with you on our dedicated Facebook support page
Our clinical nurse specialist in sepsis, Cam Howard, continues to offer quarterly online support meetings for sepsis survivors and whānau, and we encourage you to sign up here.
We know for some, that Christmas and New Year can be a really challenging time of grief and loss, and we warmly encourage you to reach out to either of the support options above, or to check out the range of support services we can direct you to here.
Thank you for your support in 2025, and we look forward to collaborating with you, and continuing our efforts to have sepsis recognised as a national health priority.
