NHS healthcare lagging on survival rates for heart attacks, strokes and cancer

The UK has higher levels of deaths from treatable diseases such as heart attack and stroke than the majority of its peer countries, along with below-average survival rates for many major cancers, a major new report on NHS healthcare has said.

With the NHS set to mark its 75th anniversary next month (on 5 July), a report by the think-tank The King’s Fund has concluded that, while the health service is “neither a leader nor a laggard” when compared to healthcare systems of similar countries, on some critical measures of resources and performance the UK is falling well below average.

The report, How does the NHS compare to the health care systems of other countries?, has analysed and compared the NHS against 19 other nations.

It has concluded that the NHS by and large offers people good protection from the potentially catastrophic costs of ill health.

The UK health service is among the most efficiently run healthcare systems, for example by spending relatively little budget on administration and keeping medicines costs low.

Yet the UK also has below-average health spending per person compared with other countries and underperforms significantly on many key healthcare outcomes, including cancer survival rates and life expectancy.

The UK has strikingly low levels of key clinical staff, with fewer doctors and nurses per head than most of its peers, and a heavier reliance on internationally trained staff.

The UK, the study found, has just three doctors per 1,000 people, while Greece has more than twice as many, with 6.3 doctors per 1,000 people.

The UK also spends less than many of its peers on physical resources, such as buildings and equipment, and comes bottom out of 19 countries for the number of CT and MRI scanners per person. The US has five times as many scanners per person and Germany has four times as many, for example.

Of the 19 countries assessed, the UK has among the lowest levels of life expectancy for men and women, with falls in life expectancy being particularly striking since the pandemic, the King’s Fund argued.

Since 2020, only the US has had consistently lower male and female life expectancy than the UK.

While life expectancy is determined by many more factors than just healthcare, the UK has higher levels of deaths from treatable diseases such as heart attack and stroke than the majority of its peer countries, and below average survival rates for many major cancers, it pointed out.

The UK also has relatively few hospital beds: 2.5 beds per 1,000 people compared to an average of 3.2, placing the UK second to last out of 19 peer countries.

The UK spends just 1.9% of health spending on administration; the 6th lowest out of all the countries measured. The proportion of administrative spend is significantly lower than the US, which spends 8.9%, and France, on 5.5%.

Waiting times in the UK for common procedures like knee, hip and cataract operations were broadly middle of the pack compared to similar countries, the King’s Fund argued.

Like in the UK, many countries in the analysis had rising waiting lists before the Covid-19 pandemic, but the fall in planned operations like these was dramatically sharper in the UK in the first year of the pandemic, it added.

Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at The King’s Fund and author of the report, said: “As the NHS turns 75, the much-loved British institution has sadly seen better days. While the UK stands out in removing most financial barriers to accessing health care and the NHS is run relatively efficiently, it trails behind its international cousins on some key markers of a good health care system.

“The pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic on our health service compounded the consequences of more than a decade of squeezed investment in staff, equipment and wider services that keep us well. This leaves the NHS delivering performance that is middling at best and the UK must do much more to reduce the number of people dying early from diseases such as heart disease and cancer,” he added.