NHS comes 14th in Europe-wide survey on health systems
Published 26 Jan 2016
The NHS is only the 14th best health system in Europe and is delivering mediocre results in too many areas of care, including patient survival, a new continent-wide survey has claimed.
The findings conflict with those of the influential Commonwealth Fund thinktank, which two years ago said the UK offered the best overall health provision out of 11 western nations it studied.
The experts behind the new study praise the NHS for some successes, such as cutting the number of people dying from a heart attack, stroke or traffic accident.
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But the 2015 Euro Health Consumer Index (ECHI) concludes that its performance is inadequate in so many important areas that it ranks just above healthcare in Slovenia, Croatia and Estonia.
Too many patients wait too long to see a GP, for treatment in A&E and to have a CT scan within a week for something serious like suspected cancer, the report says.
It also accuses the UK of denying cancer patients access to drugs that might extend their lives and of failing to deliver improvements in quality of care made by many other European nations.
But the fact that the UK comes 28th out of the 35 European countries studied for the number of doctors for every 100,000 of population may help explain some of the negative findings.
The index, produced by a Sweden-based private company of health analysts called Health Consumer Powerhouse, ranked the Netherlands as the best-performing health system of the 35. After assessing each one by 48 different criteria, it gave the Netherlands 916 points. Switzerland was a close second on 894 points and Norway third on 854. The UK was ranked 14th, with 736 points.
The report points out that in the 11 years in which it has been assessing European countries, “the UK healthcare system has never made it into the top 10 of the ECHI, mainly due to poor accessibility – together with Poland and Sweden the worst among European healthcare systems – and an autocratic top-down management culture.”
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The ECHI also claims that so-called Bismarck health systems, based on citizens taking out insurance from a range of providers that do not provide healthcare, delivers much better results than “Beveridge systems” like the NHS has been since its inception in 1948, were one body funds and provides all the care.
“The largest Beveridge countries – the UK, Spain and Italy – keep clinging together in the middle of the index”, the report states.
Prof Arne Björnberg, chair of HCP, said: “The NHS has been doing pretty much as well since the start [of the surveys] in 2005, which is mediocre. Problems are: autocratic management of a very skilled profession, resulting in [overly long] waiting times [for treatment] [and] mediocre treatment results.”
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He added that in cancer care there are “too few radiation treatment facilities (expensive) and meanness on cancer drugs (expensive), resulting in mediocre survival rates”.
Björnberg and co-collaborator Prof Johan Hjertqvist gave the UK a lot of yellow scores, denoting merely average performance in many areas.
H C P has traditionally received much of its funding from the drugs industry, though they paid for this latest report themselves from reserves and received a small grant from the Institute for Direct Democracy in Europe in Brussels, Björnberg said.
The Department of Health defended the NHS and said it was providing more care than ever before, including tests, operations and other treatments.
“In 2014 the NHS was ranked the best and most efficient in the world by the independent Commonwealth Fund, and waiting times for patients continue to be stable despite the NHS doing a million more operations a year than in 2010,” a spokeswoman said.
“We’re making sure it continues to be the best in the world by investing £10bn more every year by 2020, raising the NHS budget to the highest level in its history – as the NHS itself asked.”
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So much government propaganda by our governments over many years that the NHS is the best of the best when in truth it is on its knees.
