The UK is the sick man of Europe. Since 2010, improvements in healthy life expectancy have stalled, health inequalities have been increasing and health for people living in the most deprived areas has been getting worse. The country has been struggling with three big challenges: a decade of austerity, the Covid-19 pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis. Each of these has exposed a grim fact: Britain is an unhealthy place to be poor, even relatively poor.
A tottering NHS has not been the cause of these threats to health but, increasingly, it is not there when we need it. People have noticed. Satisfaction with the health service among the general population was at 34% in 1997. This picked up, reaching 70% in 2010 after Labour began its reforms and markedly increased funding. It has been downhill since, reaching a new low in 2022 with just 29% of people satisfied.
Michael Marmot’s spent decades shouting that inequality is what causes illness in the UK. Now that it’s fashionable to say the NHS is underfunded here he is saying that acshully, it’s because the NHS is underfunded.
Consistency’s not one of those things for the modern elite, is it?
Weird isn’t it, the UK has the worst health in Europe, despite spending well over the EU average, but its absolutely nothing to do with the healthcare system whatsoever……..
He doesn’t know what he is talking about – the alleged improvement in mortality 2001-10 was a mirage created by errors in the 2001 census (you know – the one which said Westminster had fewer adults than the number who paid Westminster’s Council Tax for their households) as the relative error in the denominator for death rates in each year of age for middle-aged/elderly increased as the absolute numerical error remained the same while the total shrank so each year 2001 to 2010 mortality was understated by a gradually increasing amount.
Improvements in mortality 2010-2019 have been understated because the comparison has been with a mirage instead of with reality; for 2020, 2021, 2022 mortality has been worse thanks to covid (and the NHS deciding to treat only some of those who need treatment).
Off Topic here’s something for those optimistic ostriches who think that the future of AI is going to be the same as yesterday only more so. https://hbr.org/2007/07/six-rules-for-effective-forecasting
“Once an inflection point arrives, people commonly underestimate the speed with which change will occur. The fact is, we are all by nature linear thinkers, and phenomena governed by the sudden, exponential growth of power laws catch us by surprise again and again. Even if we notice the beginning of a change, we instinctively draw a straight line diagonally through the S curve, and although we eventually arrive in the same spot, we miss both the lag at the start and the explosive growth in the middle. Timing, of course, is everything, and Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of companies who mistook a clear view for a short distance and others who misjudged the magnitude of the S curve they happened upon.”
I’m loathe to defend him, but he does clearly say “A tottering NHS has not been the cause of these threats to health”.
It’s nonsense of course; but at least it’s consistent.
In the seven decades I’ve been on this planet the epithet “sick man of Europe” has wandered around further and faster than the magnetic pole.
Each of these has exposed a grim fact: Britain is an unhealthy place to be poor, even relatively poor.
The equivalent of a city the size of Newcastle coming in on the boats must be badly read or gluttons for punishment…
Le Fanu, the interesting old bird who writes about GPing in the Telegraph, has suggested that there really was a pre-Covid increase in geezers falling off their perches early. He attributes it to polypharmacy i.e. to geezers being prescribed too many medicines which (i) might interact to have nasty side effects, and/or, (ii) tend to make the aforesaid old things have dizzy turns that lead to deaths by falling.
I suppose it’s an occupational hazard for GPs to assume that their decisions are important. Maybe John77’s account is a better bet.
Well, I’d argue that the lesser energy costs in France that the article mentions are due to French nukes.