Why austerity didn’t damage overall health of the nation

‘Shielding the disadvantaged’

THE 2008 financial crash and austerity had no overall impact on health in Britain, a major study has found.

While the US witnessed an increase in sickness and premature deaths, western Europe was not affected.

The study of 27 countries found that death rates declined steadily between 1980 and 2014 ‘with no interruption in this trend during the financial crisis’.

It said: ‘In the countries most severely affected by the financial crisis, declines in self-assessed health slowed following the crisis, but did so equally for people of low and high education levels.’

Led by Johan Mackenbach of Erasmus University in the Netherlands, the authors wrote: ‘Our results show that the unfavourable trends observed in the United States are not found in Europe.’

They said western European countries including Britain ‘were not associated with widening health inequalities’.

The authors suggest that having healthcare available to poorer members of society helped shield the most disadvantaged from the impact of the crash.

The authors reported that in the wake of previous recessions there are usually limited effects on a population’s health. These typically result in increases in suicide and alcohol related deaths. Road traffic fatalities usually decrease.

The researchers said that although overall health in the UK was unaffected, there might be regional differences that are masked by the overall figures.

The authors wrote: ‘For example, in the UK the impact of public sector budget cuts has been felt most severely in deprived regions, and the full effects of the crisis therefore may not be detectable in national-level data.’

In some countries severely hit by the crash – Greece, Spain and Portugal – suicide rates did rise, although deaths from all causes continued to decline overall. But the report said ‘no Western European country experienced the increases in mortality reported in America’.

The report was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was based on mortality data between 1980 and 2014 for 17 countries as well as self-reported health data from 27 countries.