{"id":146404,"date":"2018-06-25T22:04:48","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T22:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/english\/nhs-no-longer-the-envy-of-the-world-says-independent-report\/"},"modified":"2018-06-25T22:04:48","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T22:04:48","slug":"nhs-no-longer-the-envy-of-the-world-says-independent-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/english\/nhs-no-longer-the-envy-of-the-world-says-independent-report\/","title":{"rendered":"NHS no longer the envy of the world, says independent report"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure>                                  <img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Nurses giving out medications\" src=\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/320\/cpsprodpb\/F8FE\/production\/_101724736_70a49941-a803-46b5-afb9-e584b92199cb.jpg\"\/>Image copyright                  Getty Images                                                    <\/figure>\n<p class=\"caps\">The NHS is no longer the envy of the world, an independent analysis produced for the BBC says.<\/p>\n<p>The report - to mark the NHS&#039;s 70th birthday - said the UK was a &quot;below-average&quot; performer on preventing deaths from heart attacks, strokes and cancer.<\/p>\n<p>There were mitigating circumstances, though, as the health service received less funding than those in many of the other 18 industrial nations studied.<\/p>\n<p>The analysis also said there were some &quot;definite strengths&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>These included providing &quot;unusually good financial protection&quot; from the consequences of ill-health and being relatively efficient.<\/p>\n<p>The experts behind the analysis - one of five produced to mark the anniversary, on 5 July - described the NHS as a &quot;perfectly ordinary&quot; service produced for a &quot;middling level of cost&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>It contrasted this with the boast by Nye Bevan, the minister who oversaw the creation of the NHS in 1948, that the service was the &quot;envy of the world&quot;, at a time when few countries had a universal health system.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Is the NHS a champion or an also-ran?<\/li>\n<li>The history of the NHS in charts<\/li>\n<li>Nick Robinson: Let&#039;s be honest about the NHS<\/li>\n<li>Forget 70 - what will the NHS look like at 100?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&quot;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,&quot; said Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust think tank.<\/p>\n<p>His team worked with experts at the King&#039;s Fund, Health Foundation and Institute for Fiscal Studies to look at key issues facing the NHS at this key milestone.<\/p>\n<p>Alongside this, they have produced reports looking a finances, social care, technology and the health of the nation, for the BBC.<\/p>\n<p>The topics will be discussed on the BBC Two show NHS at 70 - Live on Tuesday at 20:00.<\/p>\n<p>                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Search for a health trust or postcode                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Search for your nearest health trusts                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       <\/p>\n<p>                                     Can&#039;t find your health trust?                                     Browse the full list                                 <\/p>\n<p>                                                                      Browse the full list                                                                              Go                                                                          <\/p>\n<p>                                         Rather search by typing?                                         Back to search                                     <\/p>\n<p><strong>If you can&#039;t see the NHS Tracker, <\/strong>click or tap here<strong>. <\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>How the NHS is lagging on the key killers<\/h2>\n<p>The think tanks looked at performance on the 12 most common causes of death. It found the NHS performed worse than average on eight of them.<\/p>\n<p>Particularly worrying, it said, was its track record on the three key ones - heart attacks, cancer and stroke.<\/p>\n<p>The analysis found one in nine patients in the UK died within 30 days of being admitted for the most common form of stroke and one in 11 died after a heart attack.<\/p>\n<p>This compared with just over one in seven for each measure among the best performers - although it did note there were signs of improvement with stroke.<\/p>\n<p>Performance was also below average on lung, pancreatic, colon, rectal and breast cancers.<\/p>\n<p>The NHS also had consistently higher rates of death for babies at birth or just after and in the first month of life. <\/p>\n<p>But there were some encouraging signs - it was performing better on kidney disease in terms of transplants and diabetes by preventing amputations, for example.<\/p>\n<p>And the report said societal factors, such as high income inequality or poor health of the population, may also be influencing the poor performance.<\/p>\n<p>However, overall, the think tanks said, the evidence did point to the fact the NHS was &quot;simply inferior&quot; to other leading health services.<\/p>\n<h2>Are we getting health care on the cheap?<\/h2>\n<p>The analysis said it seemed &quot;plausible&quot; that poor performance was to some extent a consequence of relatively low levels of funding that meant there was fewer resources.<\/p>\n<p>Just over \u00a33,100 per person per year is spent on health care in the UK, compared with an average of \u00a33,500.<\/p>\n<p>This meant there were fewer doctors and nurses per head than in many countries.<\/p>\n<p>It also said the health service had &quot;very low levels&quot; of hospital beds and the lowest levels of CT and MRI scanners.<\/p>\n<p>The experts blamed this on a lack of investment, saying austerity had &quot;bitten hard&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>Since 2010, the budget rises in the NHS have hovered between 1% and 2% a year - compared with the close to 4% it has traditionally enjoyed.<\/p>\n<h2>But we don&#039;t need to worry about cost<\/h2>\n<p>The most positive element of the international comparison by far was that which related to affordability.<\/p>\n<p>Because of the nature of the NHS, the authors said, it provided good financial protection against the consequences of ill-health. <\/p>\n<p>For example, it had the lowest proportion of people who skipped medicines due to cost - 2.3% compared with a 7.2% average - and pretty low numbers who missed consultations for financial reasons.<\/p>\n<p>It was also among the best for proportion of income spent on health care.<\/p>\n<p>On accessibility, the report said waiting times in the NHS were roughly in line with others, while patient experience compared well.<\/p>\n<p>Vaccination rates against illnesses such as measles and flu were high.<\/p>\n<p>Jennifer Dixon, of the Health Foundation, said the UK should be &quot;proud&quot; cost was not something people feared.<\/p>\n<p>But she added: &quot;If we want to hold our head up high next to our European neighbours, we can and must do better.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>The Department for Health and Social Care said the analysis contrasted with a Commonwealth Fund report that rated the NHS the &quot;best and safest&quot; system in the world.<\/p>\n<p>A spokeswoman said survival rates were improving for a number of conditions and the extra funding recently announced - the budget will grow by \u00a320bn a year in England by 2023 - would help make even more progress and &quot;secure its future&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>Read more from Nick<\/p>\n<p>Follow Nick on Twitter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Image copyright Getty Images The NHS is no longer the envy of the world, an independent analysis produced for the BBC says. The report - to mark the NHS&#039;s 70th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":146405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freeonlinetranslators.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}