SICK BRITAIN
NHS crisis as 22m suffer two or more chronic conditions One-in-four lives could be saved with better patient care
BRITAIN is facing the gravest health crisis in NHS history as 22 million people battle multiple diseases, latest worrying research shows.
Experts estimate a third of the UK now suffers from at least two long-term conditions prompting calls for a radical overhaul of out-ofdate health services.
The most common are depression, high blood pressure, osteoarthritis and chronic obstructive lung disease. But the hit-list also includes obesity, diabetes, cancer and kidney disease – different diseases increasingly seen together.
Health chiefs are at a loss
to explain the crisis but said so-called multimorbidity is now so common it affects all ages and could spell financial disaster for an already stretched NHS.
The emergency is laid bare in a report published today by the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Professor Stephen MacMahon, one of 17 international experts who helped compile the dossier, said: “Most health services, including the NHS, are not designed to care for patients with multiple illnesses. This is likely to contribute to the increasing pressure on budgets.
“There is something happening in the background that is causing rapid increases in the numbers of patients with a single disease developing others and that’s what we don’t understand fully, particularly when those diseases are otherwise disconnected.”
The stark warning about the impact on NHS comes as separate analysis shows one in four deaths could be avoided if Britain provided quality healthcare.
The number of people that could have been saved if medical excellence had been available at the time of their death was 75,736 in 2016 – up from 71,656 in 2014.
Avoidable
The leading cause of so-called “amenable deaths” – ones which could have been avoided with good quality medical care – was cardiovascular diseases like heart attacks and strokes, which accounted for more than two fifths.
Cancer was the leading cause of avoidable death across the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics which said 141,101 deaths out of 597,206 were avoidable in 2016.
Dr Ian Campbell, a GP in Nottingham, said: “Across the UK the NHS, both general practice and hospital services, are stretched beyond belief. Whatever the stats, those of us on the frontline know that we are not coping. And whatever reasons we might believe are the cause, the inescapable truth is this is a tragedy and completely unacceptable.
“Every avoidable death is someone’s father, mother, husband or wife, lost because of a failure of the NHS to treat acute illness adequately and a failure of public health to prevent it. A strong efficient NHS is a political choice – so too is a weak and underperforming NHS. We do have a choice.”
The experts behind the multimorbidity report said the NHS needs to prepare to treat a population with increasingly complex medical needs, arguing it was designed to treat people with one illness at a time.
They said the typical 10 minute GP appointment is no longer enough and claim scant resources mean it is not possible to create the extra time patients really need.
The prevalence of multimorbidity has increased by a third in just a decade. In 2002 just 31 per cent of those aged 50 or over in England had two or more chronic conditions, but that figure jumped to 43 per cent in 2013.
Those aged 65 typically have three or more conditions, while those aged 85 are battling between five and seven.
NHS England said: “The report is further evidence England’s NHS is right to continue driving integration in care, which is already delivering results across the country, including preventing strokes through better monitoring of high-risk patients by GPs and pharmacists, and integrated mental and physical health care for people with diabetes and other long-term physical conditions.”
The Department of Health and Social Care said: “We know that our growing ageing population means more people than ever are living with multiple long-term conditions which in turn places more pressure on the system.
“Caring for these patients requires a longer term partnership with individuals and that’s why we are committed to integrating health and social care so people can access the care they expect and deserve.”
IT IS an almost unbelievable figure: a quarter of deaths in 2016 could have been avoided with better and more effective healthcare. On the back of this it is clear that we now need a royal commission to deal with the issue. Politically this country is so tribal that we need something that can rise above the petty politics and tackle the issues involved, objectives and the care we will need to provide.
Of course this is a complex issue and in many cases our GPs will be unable to help. For a start individuals could help themselves by adopting a healthier lifestyle – there is no shortage of advice out there about how to do that – and while we’re not suggesting that everyone takes up marathon running, eating and drinking less and getting a bit more exercise might be a start. But some of the issues involved concern the society we live in today.
Depression, for example, and high blood pressure are both linked to many lifestyle elements and we need to have a clear and comprehensive look at how to tackle these head-on.
The NHS, with its limited resources, has been doing its best but we need to go beyond that. We are living longer, with health issues that earlier generations could not even have dreamed of and this is too important to allow our two major political parties to try to make capital out of it.
We need to rise above politics and we need to do it now.