Survival from breast cancer in Israel is higher than the OECD average, and the rate of mammography screening among Israeli women over 50 is higher than the average.
Advertisement
We have the highest rate of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD) hospital admissions of 32 countries surveyed; the case fatality rate for the most common type of stroke puts us at 24th in a similar league table; and we are placed in the bottom third of countries for alcohol consumption and obesity levels.
Mark Pearson of the OECD said: “The United Kingdom is world leader in developing innovative approaches to healthcare but often does not do the basic things very well”. Compared with the previous edition, this new edition includes a new set of dashboards of health indicators to summarise in a clear and user-friendly way the relative strengths and weaknesses of OECD countries on different key indicators of health and health system performance, and also a special focus on the pharmaceutical sector.
Private spending on prescription- drug copayments by Israeli residents is 15% of national health expenditures, compared to the OECD average of 20% – but the costs here continue to rise, and drugs are expected to be a bigger burden on the economy due to the aging of the population and higher costs of drugs, the report said. Countries with more doctors include Greece, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Israel and Australia.
He said: “While the OECD has shown the NHS is short of 75,000 doctors and nurses, which will require an addition £5bn per year to fund, the Tories are intent on forcing through another £22bn “efficiency savings” by 2020″.
The public have been getting behind the Express.co.uk petition to urge the Government to scrap the plans which doctors say will mean longer hours and less pay.
Mr Pearson pointed to NHS achievements, including being efficient in a few areas, such as lengths of stay in hospital and good performance on avoidable admissions for diabetes. The obesity rate among children and adults in Canada is higher than in most other OECD countries, according to the report, as more than 26 per cent of Canadian adults were obese in 2013.
Mr Pearson said many medics were too rushed to improve the care they give.
“At the moment in the NHS I think there is the risk that people do not have the time to do that”.
Mr Edwards added: “If people are stretched, people don’t have the bandwidth to make a change”. We use juniors to provide the backbone of the workforce in hospitals rather than [senior] doctors’.
Advertisement
“The NHS is capable of excellent care, but as these findings show, this is not always translating into results that match the best in Europe”.
