The NHS has come under increasing pressure over recent years on account of higher demand for services and funding and personnel shortages — issues further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Chronic underinvestment within the U.K.’s National Health Service means Britons are prone to die sooner from serious diseases than patients in other wealthy nations, in accordance with a recent study.
The U.K. “performs poorly” in comparison with OECD nations on combatting conditions comparable to cancer and heart disease, leading to higher-than-average rates for each preventable and treatable mortality, the report published Monday by the King’s Fund health think tank found.
Among the many 19 countries studied, the U.K. was found to lag behind most of its peers on life expectancy, although the report notes that that is a problem significantly affected by aspects beyond the direct control of any health system.
Britain’s “below average” healthcare outcomes are on account of “below average” investment in physical resources, including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners and hospital beds, low levels of clinical staff and being “heavily reliant” on foreign-trained staff, researchers found.
Poor remuneration for some groups of doctors and nurses — a problem which has led to months of business motion throughout the NHS — was also cited as a reason for the U.K.’s lack of competitiveness versus peer countries comparable to Austria, Belgium and Germany.
75 years of the NHS
The findings come because the U.K. next month marks the seventy fifth anniversary of the publicly-funded NHS, which was arrange in 1948 by the post-war Labour government to make free healthcare accessible to everyone.
The NHS has come under increasing pressure over recent years on account of higher demand for services and funding and personnel shortages — issues further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
A spokesperson for the U.K.’s Department of Health and Social Care told CNBC that the federal government was investing £14.1 billion ($17.9 billion) to enhance services and cut waiting lists. They added that “record numbers of staff were working within the NHS.”
The federal government is ready to publish a workforce plan on Thursday to tackle ongoing staff shortages, which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Sunday could be “some of the significant announcements within the history of the NHS.”
He added that delays in care provision, that are currently at record highs, were “because we have had a pandemic.”
King’s Fund researchers said that most of the issues identified within the report pre-date the Covid-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, they said the crisis had “contributed to a toxic cocktail of pressures” on the health service.
Amongst the intense spots within the report, the U.K. was found to perform “relatively well” on some measures of efficiency and spending on administration.
U.K. patients were also said to receive relatively good protection from the possibly catastrophic costs of ailing health, though that safety net was said to be “worryingly threadbare in some areas.”
