News from the New Party

NHS failings leave 17,000 dead

If the UK were to achieve the same level of “mortality amenable to healthcare” as the average of the other European countries studied, there would have been 17,157 fewer deaths in 2004, the most recent year for which data is available.

This is equivalent to over five times the total number of deaths in road accidents and over two and a half times the number of deaths related to alcohol in 2004.

Steady improvements in mortality rates, relative to European peers, have been made at almost exactly the same rate throughout the Thatcher, Major and Blair governments despite huge increases in spending from 1999 to date.  There can no longer be any doubt that the Government’s extra NHS spending has completely failed to deliver results.

If NHS spending had continued to increase relative to European peers at its pre-1999 rate £34.3 billion – £1,350 per household – less would have been spent between 1999 and 2004.  In 2004 alone, £9.8 billion less would have been spent, 9.7 per cent of total spending in that year.  This extra money has largely been wasted.

“The NHS should not be a religion, with its structure set in tablets of stone.  We face a choice between a modern, consumer driven service for all or a decaying, bureaucratic system which only those with their own resources manage to escape.  Politicians need to read this report carefully and determine the optimal strategy they can put to a well informed public.  Those that capture the best way forward will carry the British voter with them.”