Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether NHS England plans to introduce standardised national protocols for interpreting oxygen saturation thresholds in children with chronic cardiac conditions.

The National Paediatric Early Warning System (NPEWS) was launched in England in November 2023. The use of NPEWS allows for a standard approach to recognition and escalation of concern when a child might be deteriorating. NPEWS works by assigning a score to varying levels of physiological values including oxygen saturations, depending on how far from normal those values are.

Recent evaluation by the Liverpool DETECT study group has found that NPEWS predictive performance remained very good within cohorts of children with and without cardiac disease.