Jan 2008 18

MAJOR STUDY ON THE NHS REVEALS OVER 17,000 UNNECESSARY DEATHS A YEAR5

Download the full report here (PDF).

  • A statistical analysis of World Health Organisation data reveals that the poor performance of the NHS is causing 17,157 deaths per year
  • £34 billion of extra spending under Brown has made no difference to UK mortality

Using data from the World Health Organisation and statistical techniques pioneered in the British Medical Journal, the TaxPayers’ Alliance has produced a major report on NHS performance since the 1980s.

Wasting Lives: A statistical analysis of NHS performance in a European context since 1981, analyses data from the WHO to estimate the number of deaths that could plausibly have been averted by the NHS since the 1980s.  The measure used is known as “mortality amenable to healthcare”.  The calculations compare the UK performance to that of Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

  • If the UK were to achieve the same level of “mortality amenable to healthcare” as the average of the other European countries studied, there would have been 17,157 fewer deaths in 2004, the most recent year for which data is available. 
  • This is equivalent to over five times the total number of deaths in road accidents and over two and a half times the number of deaths related to alcohol in 2004.
  • Steady improvements in mortality rates, relative to European peers, have been made at almost exactly the same rate throughout the Thatcher, Major and Blair governments despite huge increases in spending from 1999 to date.  There can no longer be any doubt that the Government’s extra NHS spending has completely failed to deliver results.
  • If NHS spending had continued to increase relative to European peers at its pre-1999 rate £34.3 billion – £1,350 per household – less would have been spent between 1999 and 2004.  In 2004 alone, £9.8 billion less would have been spent, 9.7 per cent of total spending in that year.  This extra money has largely been wasted.

Matthew Sinclair, author of the report and a Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“Thousands are dying every year thanks to Britain’s health service not delivering the standards people expect and receive in other European countries.  Billions of pounds have been thrown at the NHS but the additional spending has made no discernable difference to the long-term pattern of falling mortality.  This is a colossal waste of lives and money.  We need to learn lessons from European countries with healthcare systems that don’t suffer from political management, monopolistic provision and centralisation.”

Professor Karol Sikora, Medical Director of CancerPartnersUK, steering group member of Doctors for Reform and author of the foreword to the report, said:

“The NHS should not be a religion, with its structure set in tablets of stone.  We face a choice between a modern, consumer driven service for all or a decaying, bureaucratic system which only those with their own resources manage to escape.  Politicians need to read this report carefully and determine the optimal strategy they can put to a well informed public.  Those that capture the best way forward will carry the British voter with them.”

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  • http://www.healthdirect.co.uk/2007/11/one-in-10-suffers-hospital-harm-as.html Simon Dye

    Excellent research and a depressing result. A sad expose of labour’s incompetent NHS policies.
    Unfortunately, these 17,000 deaths represent less than a fifth of the total preventable NHS deaths.
    One in 10 suffers hospital harm as blunders kill 90,000 patients.
    Accidents, errors and mishaps in hospital affect as many as one in 10 in-patients, claim researchers. The report in the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care said up to half of these were preventable was carried by the Health Direct blog at:
    http://www.healthdirect.co.uk/2007/11/one-in-10-suffers-hospital-harm-as.html

  • Narinder Chahal

    This is without a doubt proof that the money in the NHS is indeed wasted. The public purse is being abused and yet this Government continue to cloud the real issue of providing care to the vulnerable by their empty statistics- Labour management of the healthcare system has rendered the UK impotent. There is better healthcare in some of the third world countries especially end of life care. We have seen for ourselves the real price of NHS failure- it is a travesty this is not being addressed fully by those empowered to drive the change. I think we assume- when we are ill, we will go to hospital and get the care we need. We assume when we are dying we will have the option to die at home. This is not the case in the UK- we have a very serious problem which has just been ignored.

  • Frederick William Hall

    Labour have continued The Tory Policy that Thatcher instigated as advised by the American Milton Freedman(?) It has led the Labour Government into the costly PFI scandal and in North Staffordshire, hospital food prepared in Siouth Wales and carted here. It is awful. We have PCT (Private Care Trusts) with American backing taking over perfectly well run Surgeries and itenerant Doctors appearing to keep the thing going.
    If Labour got back to Labour then we may improve what Labour started.
    Fred Hall Retired Managing Director.

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  • from a UK GP

    Just come across this analysis. You have to agree with the central thesis that if the only response to NHS inadequacies is to spend money (and Labour had spent the previous two decades in howling outrage about “cuts” and underfunding), its not going to spent efficiently – and the more you spend, the less efficiently it gets used. This is so completely unsurprising that its odd that it takes a whole report to realise it.
    I’d also like to correct a couple of odd inaccuracies. The international comparisons contain some inaccurate but self-revealing comments. “GPs are – as in the UK – the gate-keepers to the system, and like in the UK, dissatisfaction is aimed primarily at this point in the health care process” is an odd statement when satisfaction rates are highest for this sector compared to others in the NHS. And “What distinguishes them [Dutch GPs] from British GPs is the emphasis given to communication, which is an integral part of their special training” is in fact not a difference but a similarity.
    From my perspective, what is holding up progress in the NHS is disposal of large sums of money on flagship schemes (the NHS computer spine is a good example), PFI which could have been a good idea but has become a massively expensive way of getting new facilities, and the copious over-regulation which wastes enormous amounts of time to little or no effect. Worst of all though the belief that power and decision making is best carried out by a new manager class, who are expensive, have few discernable outputs, are over-sensitive to consumer rather than health priorities (so pander to the “fussy well” rather than focus on the “quiet, un-pushy, usually elderly unwell”) and behave as if there is no need for managers to be accountable.
    No other country runs their health system like the NHS – I wonder why?