Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt recently announced some 30,000 people die every year due to the “shocking underperformance” of the National Health Service.
His statement was made after a large international comparison found Britain is lagging behind other nations in terms of sickness and life expectancy. Mr Hunt suggested that England’s failure to match the richer countries in Europe is causing tens of thousands of people to die too early.
He believes all middle-aged people should be offered routine health checks to help detect problems in the early stages. These checks should particularly focus upon the five biggest killers – heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory and liver disease.
These five conditions alone account for 150,000 deaths every year, and yet the Department of Health believes 30,000 of these deaths could be avoided if NHS standards were improved. Mr Hunt suggested that the NHS simply is not good enough at preventing illness, while the standard of treatment fails to match that of countries such as Sweden.
“Despite real progress in cutting deaths we remain a poor relative to our global cousins on many measures of health, something I want to change” Mr Hunt said. “For too long we have been lagging behind and I want the reformed health system to take up this challenge and turn this shocking underperformance around.”
In response to the Health Secretary’s statement, Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients Association, said: “The public will find it scandalous that thousands of patients are dying needlessly because of a postcode lottery on prevention, diagnoses and care for those with often treatable conditions.”
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