Jason Watkins said he hopes people connect with the personal grief behind his campaign on sepsis as he prepares to speak at an event in parliament. The actor, whose two-year-old daughter Maude died from sepsis in 2011, said on Sunday that his family’s experience still shapes everything he does on the issue.

Watkins said he was due to attend the parliamentary event shortly to address sepsis and sepsis care, and he linked that work directly to the loss of Maude. “I have such a personal story, and I hope people connect with that,” he said, adding: “My journey of pain, and my daughter Maude, and Clara my wife, my family what we've endured, I hope people connect with that.”

Maude died on New Year’s Day in 2011 after Watkins discovered her deceased in her bed following a bout of flu. Her symptoms had masked the sepsis, and the condition was not identified despite two visits to hospital. Watkins and his wife Clara have continued to speak publicly about what happened, turning a private tragedy into a long-running warning about how easily sepsis can be missed.

The family brought that account to a wider audience in 2023 with the ITV documentary Jason and Clara: In Memory of Maude, and they also discussed her death on Giovanna Fletcher’s Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast that year. Clara said Maude had been “just unlucky,” and described the loss as especially painful because she believes it could have been avoided.

“I think it's important to say, some parents are listened to. I do believe it to be luck. That makes it so much more painful to me because this is a death that could have been avoided,” Clara said. She also said she blamed herself for not pushing harder at the hospital, saying: “Why didn't I scream at shout at the hospital and demand they keep her there? I failed at the thing I was supposed to be doing, I was supposed to keep her alive.”

The campaign has endured because sepsis is not a rare abstract danger in the Watkins household; it is the reason Maude is gone, and the reason the family keeps speaking. Watkins and Clara also share a daughter, Bessie, and a son, Gilbert, and his public remarks suggest he sees the parliament appearance as part of a continuing effort to force attention on sepsis care before another family learns the lesson too late.