UK health spending same as other nations – so why’s care worse?

THE UK offers a worse healthcare service than many other Western countries despite spending a similar amount of money, a major analysis has found.

British patients are significantly more likely to die following a heart attack, stroke, cancer diagnosis and other longterm illnesses.

The UK also has fewer doctors, nurses, scanners and hospital beds than the majority of the 18 other most developed nations.

Yet our spend on healthcare is close to the average, despite previous concerns that we invest significantly less than other countries.

In 2016, the UK invested £3,158 per head, only marginally lower than the average of £3,535 per head across all countries. Greece, which spends only £1,675 per person on health, has twice as many doctors per 1,000 people as Britain.

The analysis was carried out by four leading think- tanks: the Nuffield Trust, King’s Fund, Health Foundation and Institute for Fiscal Studies.

They compared existing data on health performance for the UK and 18 other countries including Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada and the USA.

The UK was found to have the second lowest number of doctors per person of all the nations with just 2.8 doctors per 1,000 people.

By comparison there were 6.3 per 1,000 in Greece, 5.2 in Austria and 4.2 in Sweden.

The UK was also found to have the lowest number of MRI scanners per population. These are crucial for diagnosing cancer, strokes, dementia and brain injury.

But there are just 7.2 scanning machines per million population compared to 33.6 per million in Germany, 36.7 in the USA and 51.7 in Japan. The UK’s breast cancer survival rates were the fourth worst and rankings were similarly poor for other cancer types.

While 85.6 per cent of British women survive for five years after a breast cancer diagnosis, this rises to 89.5 per cent in Australia and 90.2 per cent in the US.

Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, said the analysis revealed a ‘mixed picture’.

He added: ‘One thing is clear: we run a health system with very scarce resources and achieve poor outcomes in some vital areas like cancer survival.’

Dr Jennifer Dixon, chief executive of the Health Foundation, added: ‘The UK has middling funding and middling performance overall. If we want to hold our head up high next to our European neighbours we can and must do better.’

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: ‘Too many people in the UK die when good medical care could have saved their lives.’

The analysis found the UK had the second highest death rate for heart attack patients following hospital treatment. An average of 8.8 per cent of cardiac attack patients die after 30 days compared to 7.6 per cent in Italy and 7.7 per cent in Denmark.

In this country, there was also the second lowest number of hospital beds per population at just 2.6 per 1,000. This compares to 13.2 per 1,000 people in Japan, 8.1 in Germany and 7.6 in Austria.

In addition, the UK had the second highest rate of babies dying at birth or in the month afterwards.

An average of 2.7 per 1,000 babies born die within a month here compared to 2.3 per 1,000 in Germany and 1.7 in Sweden.