17.06.14
UK’s health service the best in the west
The UK’s health service has been ranked as the best out of 11 of the world’s wealthiest countries in a new report.
The ‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall’ study, conducted by American think tank The Commonwealth Fund, compared the quality, efficiency, cost and performance of the US health system with those of Canada and eight other countries in Europe and Australasia, including the UK.
The report stated: “The UK continues to demonstrate strong performance and ranked first overall, though lagging notably on health outcomes.”
In particular the UK ranked second to last for the ‘healthy lives’ indicator, which looked at mortality treatable with medical care, infant mortality, and healthy life expectancy at age 60.
However, despite this blip, the UK’s health service leads most other nations in providing feedback to patients with 84% of doctors receiving patient satisfaction data, compared with 60% in the US, which ranked third in that category.
The study also revealed: “The UK has short waiting times for basic medical care and nonemergency access to services after hours. And the UK also has improved waiting times to see a specialist and now rates fourth on this dimension with the US ranking third.”
The report ranks the UK first overall, scoring it highly for its quality of care, efficiency and low cost at the point of service, with Switzerland coming an overall second. The US came last, as it has done in four other editions of ‘Mirror, Mirror’ since 2004.
It was also highlighted that there is a frequent misperception that trade-offs between universal coverage and timely access to specialised services are inevitable; however, the Netherlands, UK and Germany provide universal coverage with “low out-of-pocket costs while maintaining quick access to specialty services”.
Paul Evans, director of campaign group the NHS Support Federation, said: “The report shows that the basic concept of the NHS not only works, it stands up well against all other systems.”
The results are based on the Commonwealth Fund’s information from its own 2011 national health system scorecard, as well as evidence from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It also used policy surveys of patients and primary care physicians, who discussed their views on their countries’ health systems.
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