NHS a laggard on patient outcomes, says think tank

The UK is falling behind many of its peers on healthcare outcomes, including life expectancy and avoidable deaths, according to a new study.

The analysis by the King’s Fund think tank finds that survival rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease remain “relatively poor” compared to a basket of 18 similar countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Japan, Singapore, and the US.

That likely contributes to the finding that the UK is among the countries with the lowest levels of life expectancy for men and women, ahead of only the US.

Overall, the UK is “neither a leader nor a laggard,” according to the report, but its position relative to its peers seems “largely stagnant”.

It also finds no pattern suggesting other health system models are superior to the UK’s taxpayer-funded approach, concluding that the goal should be “improving, rather than unwinding, the model of healthcare we have.”

“Even countries such as Germany and Singapore, that score highly on several health system performance measures, are facing the challenge of rising demand from a growing and ageing population and the need to improve health care outcomes,” commented Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at the King’s Fund and the study’s author.

Staffing crisis

Along with a poorer performance on survival rates for common diseases – coming 16th and 18th, respectively, for preventable and treatable causes of mortality – one area that stands out is the UK’s relative lack of clinical staff.

There is a high reliance on foreign-trained staff, but strikingly fewer doctors and nurses per head than most peer countries, says the King’s Fund. The UK ranks lower than all other European countries on the number of doctors per 1,000 people and also scores poorly for nurses, with “strikingly low numbers on both of these staffing measures.”

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has promised that the much-delayed NHS workforce plan, which aims to tackle historically high levels of staff shortages, will include provisions aimed at reducing the country’s reliance on imported healthcare workers.

On the plus side, the UK performs well when it comes to protecting people from some of the financial costs of ill health and offers one of the lowest-cost and most efficiently run health systems in the world. However, it operates with fewer key resources, such as medical equipment and beds, than its peers, with below-average health spending per person.

The report was commissioned by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), which said it revealed that the UK’s spending on medicines is also lower compared to equivalent countries in Europe.

The country performs reasonably well on the speed of approval of new medicines, but adoption rates are lower than the average of comparator countries, according to the industry body.

One year after a new medicine is launched, for every 100 patients who get it in similar countries across the world, only 58 eligible UK patients get the same treatment, it said. That rate rises to 81 after five years.

The ABPI draws a link between low spending on medicines and the slow adoption of innovative treatments, with poorer outcomes on mortality, as well as hospital admissions for treatable diseases.

“If the NHS is to successfully prevent and treat disease and deliver the best possible standards of care for patients, better use of medicines must be part of the strategy,” said ABPI’s strategic partnerships policy director, Brian Duggan.