NHS lags behind at preventing avoidable deaths

The NHS performs worse than most developed countries in saving lives from many common diseases, a study has found. The research by four think tanks shows Britain is the third worst of 18 Western countries at preventing avoidable deaths, ahead of just the US and Portugal.

THE NHS performs worse than most developed countries in saving lives from many of the most common diseases, an international study shows.

The research by four think tanks showed Britain was the third worst of 18 Western countries at preventing avoidable deaths.

It also fared worse than average in the treatment of eight out of the 12 most common causes of death, including deaths within 30 days of having a heart attack and within five years of being diagnosed with breast cancer, rectal cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer and lung cancer.

Death rates for newborns were also consistently higher than elsewhere, the study showed, with seven in 1,000 babies having died at birth or in the week afterwards in the UK in 2016, compared with an average of 5.5 across the comparator countries.

The report’s authors said the research showed that claims the NHS “is the envy of the world” were exaggerated. So, too, were claims it was wholly inferior to other systems, they said.

The findings showed the NHS also has fewer doctors, nurses, hospital beds and CT and MRI scanners than other countries and spent a slightly below-average proportion of national income on healthcare.

The report, entitled How Good is the NHS? and published by the Nuffield Trust, the Health Foundation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and The King’s Fund, looked at three aspects of what constitutes a good healthcare system in the UK compared with 18 similar developed countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA. These were speed and accessibility of care; the efficiency of the system; and the outcomes it achieved. It also looked at what the health service had to work with in terms of money, staff, equipment and the health of the population.

The study said the NHS commitment to healthcare free at the point of use meant people were least likely to miss out on medicine because of its costs.

Overall, it had the lowest proportion of people who skipped medicine due to cost (2.3 per cent in 2016 compared with an average of 7.2 per cent across the comparator countries).

It was also found to be relatively efficient: the UK has the largest share of generic prescribing of all comparator countries, at 84 per cent in 2015 compared to an average of 50 per cent.

Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, said: “Discussion about the NHS is often marked by an unhelpful degree of exaggeration, from those that claim it is the envy of the world to those who say it is inferior to other systems. The reality is a much more mixed picture, but one thing is clear: we run a health system with very scarce resources in terms of staff and equipment and achieve poor outcomes in some vital areas like cancer survival.”

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said: “The truth about the NHS is that by international standards it is a perfectly ordinary healthcare system, providing average levels of care for a middling level of cost. Access is good and people are protected from high costs, but its performance in treating people with cancer is poor, and international comparisons suggest too many people in the UK die when good medical care could have saved their lives.”