I hope you’re feeling better if not now @GrrrlPwr, soon, at least. I know it’s brutal (& v old-fashioned), but if ever you’re stuck with nothing at home for your throat & you’ve to wait for an appointment, you can gargle with warm salt water. It’s less horrible than gargling with TCP, mind you. I used to get tonsillitis essentially endlessly, leading into glandular fever (followed by post-viral fatigue) at the end of my first year at university. Then straight back to constant cycles of infection all through second year when I was referred to have them out. Unfortunately hospital in uni town wouldn’t do it as I’d need minding afterwards; but my local hospital put me on day surgery list & then wouldn’t fix things to do the surgery over the Christmas holidays still. Technically still better to have them out over Easter, but I had to write a Long Essay that contributed to my finals grade that holiday; & the mucking about messed with my dissertation as well; & my DoS didn’t apply for special consideration because she was a bit of a special packet of biscuits about things… Anyway, just watch for not being able to work out what’s wrong with “Florence Nightingale was opposed to the training of women as nurses” for a good five minutes 
But yes, do hope you stop feeling grim soon - and that you don’t lose too much time with work. Are they reasonable about people being ill? I mean, I know it’s 0 hours, but is your manager ok/helpful/sympathetic, at least? I know missing a day is stressful money-wise, but please try to use it to rest & sleep & generally look after yourself as well as you can 
While - like the US - the UK’s sepsis rates haven’t been decreasing anything like as quickly as desirable, Denmark, Greece & Lithuania saw rising rates 1990-2015. Crucially, the people who carried out 2018’s vital research noted that Various efforts have been made to improve standards for diagnosis, management and outcome reporting but it is unclear what effect, if any, these have had on mortality rates… there remains significant variability between health systems with respect to trends in sepsis-related mortality and between sexes in some countries. System-level and population-level factors may contribute to these differences and additional investigations are necessary to further explain these trends. It’s not as simple as “Finland has the best healthcare system because they reduced their sepsis rates by 80.9 percent - GIVE THEM ALL THE PRIZES AND ALL COPY THEM AT ONCE!” If it were, we’d be grand. The people most likely to die from sepsis in the global south would doubtless still be up the proverbial creek with water coming into the boat; nothing to bail with; no chance of reaching the bank; & a wee gang of crocodiles casually bobbing about nearby - a mere lack of paddle being a fairly minor consideration.
Media coverage at the start of 2020 of research published in the Lancet about global trends in sepsis left out that the US [still] has higher sepsis rates than the UK - and indeed that it is the view of the UK Sepsis Trust that better awareness would have a dramatic effect on reducing cases in the UK. Nothing about the horrific mortality rate associated with childbirth for black women in the UK - clearly the government (& NHS) actually engaging with MBRRACE’s Saving Lives, Improving Mothers’ Care is desperately important in & of itself, but if it were to lead to a reduction in sepsis as well, that would be incredible.
One of the big issues when trying to treat sepsis? Antibiotic resistance. This paper from 2013 found some really quite disturbing levels of resistance to abx in patients with sepsis. The authors of that paper are very clear that “strategies for limiting or modifying antibiotic use are needed to control resistance growth and to improve the rational use of antibiotics”; proposing “ antibiotic cycling/rotation, scheduled antibiotic changes, and antibiotic mixing” in addition to following the 7 strategies to prevent antibiotic resistance that were suggested by Kollef in 2005.* The EU emphatically do not consider it good practice to sell antibiotics OTC & have specifically stated sales of antibiotics without prescription and patients buying incomplete courses of treatment or the wrong antibiotic are important drivers of the development of resistance in their 2011 Strategic Action Plan on Antibiotic Resistance.
Unless you happen to have be qualified as a GP/PA/NP & have the most extraordinary levels of clinical detachment; OR you have a very clear treatment plan that involves abx kept at home/immediately dispensed on request - you don’t know that antibiotics are indicated; or if they are, which ones/how long for, if they aren’t effective do you run another course or change to something else? Recovery from what would/should have been a self-limiting infection will inevitably be attributed to antibiotics where they are obtained; & despite there having been signs in GP surgeries about antibiotic resistance - frequently requesting that you not ask your doctor for antibiotics - for at least 20 years; an astonishing number of people just refuse to engage. Including lots of parents who want antibiotics for their children on the grounds they were always given them for similar infections as a child 
It does sometimes seem there are posters who wait for any thread that might be even tangentially connected to the NHS just so they can attack it. It seems to have bypassed a lot of people that the UK healthcare spend and funding from taxes are both low. (Oh & unless you have issues with your memory, are a small child who’s no business on here - or perhaps are a goldfish, just to cover all bases - the 2019 bump certainly isn’t the largest you’ll remember but rather more Tory posturing). It’s also nowhere near enough money - it sounds like a ridiculously huge sum, but when you consider what the NHS does & the investment it requires to be able to work really well… it’s not even enough to get the NHS back to where it was pre-pandemic, never mind make improvements. Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly serious issues with the NHS - but if it were the disaster people claim, it simply wouldn’t have survived the pandemic. (Oh & it’s well worth reading the whole article, btw, because it’s a very complex picture & as well as the things I think everyone’s aware of [need for more beds & more clinical staff] there are things like The UK had the lowest percentage of physicians who were dissatisfied with the time they were able to spend with patients (UK, 2%; study average, 13%) and was tied with Canada and Netherlands for the lowest percentage of physicians who were dissatisfied with their income (UK, 20%; study average, 32%) even though remuneration of specialists and nurses in the UK was slightly below the average of the comparator countries…but remuneration of general practitioners was similar to the mean of the group.
All health systems have issues & variations in the care available & quality of HCPs. For example, epic fail from the German nurse who kept repeating to me in English that my mother (who had died in very sudden & traumatic circumstances just over 3 years earlier) would come to collect me soon. Despite my explaining every time - in German - that my mother was dead; I was on a school German Exchange; & it was my teacher who was coming to get me. After my (27 year old!) teacher looked suitably horrified at the beaming “so here is your mother at last!” she was greeted with (swiftly followed by what was basically a wail from me of “I kept explaining! Every time! But she just kept on!) - the nurse replied to my teacher’s near-identical (as in, switching up the person) explanation with “I just thought she didn’t know what she was talking about, a dead mother at her age”. And then made my teacher stand in the cubicle with us while she did an ECG before I was allowed home. To top things off, that hospital (unlike the Belgian one I ended up in on the way home: it was a fun trip ) apparently hadn’t the first idea of how to process an E111 form so I kept getting sent bills for my treatment, which was terrifying-horrifying as a [rule-fixated] 13/14 year old. If you read around, you’ll find people unhappy with their health service, whatever it may be - although in a broader discussion, it seems you’ll essentially have the rest of the world criticising (& to be fair, not without good reason) the American healthcare system; especially when contributors (as they so often do) make it clear they’ve no idea at all about what the NHS is actually like.
And on that note, I really ought to check my Rx went through ok (controlled drugs can cause issues because the computer system gets very insistent about the idea they should be dispensed on the same day your last script runs out…) then either contact GP surgery or email the pharmacist to ask when they think they’ll be able to deliver; ring the podiatry service to book an appointment (no, I don’t have diabetes); ring the GP surgery to book my 8-weekly B12 injection; email the IV Team about my portacath; and read the email that’s just appeared from my dietitian & reply to her…
- (1) Establishment of a formal protocol and guidelines; (2) Hospital formulary restrictions; (3) Use of narrow spectrum antibiotics when supported by clinical situation and culture data; (4) Combination antibiotic therapy; (5) Shorter courses of antibiotic treatment; (6) Antibiotic heterogeneity; and (7) Optimization of pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic principles.