UK drops health care ranking
The UK has dropped eight places in the performance rankings of healthcare systems in industrialised countries.
The new rankings are based on how many deaths could be avoided through timely and effective health care. This approach pushes the UK down to 18th place, much lower than the last assessment undertaken by the World Health Organisation. Calculated three years ago, Britain was placed tenth.
The last ranking system was rather controversial and there were claims it was misleading. The WHO examined health outcomes, responsiveness, and fairness of financing as measures of performance. Some claimed it was unjust to look at all deaths, whatever their cause.
The alternative approach, taken by a team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, surveys only those deaths avoidable through timely and effective health care. This allows sole focus on the performance of the health care system and filters out the effects of other confounding factors such as diet and smoking rates.
Dr Ellen Nolte, one of the report’s authors, comments: ‘The paper provides new measures of health system performance for industrialised countries, where data on death rates by cause are available to allow this analysis to be done.
‘We have looked at how the WHO’s rankings of health system performance would change if only those causes amenable to health care were included. They show that, for some countries, the differences would be very substantial.’
Along with the UK, Japan, Italy and Greece perform less well according to the new ratings. However other countries such as Canada, Finland and Sweden have been boosted by this alternative approach to measuring health care performance.
The study is published in the BMJ today.
