I have been updating the British record in heart disease. At the talk on Wednesday, Niall Dickson, chief executive of the King's Fund (who defended the NHS with remarkable enthusiasm) was very keen on the idea that the British record on diseases (I think it was heart disease in particular) had improved markedly. It is certainly true that the deaths from heart disease have reduced in that way. However so have the figures for many other countries, including Australia, Canada and Germany. The exceptions are those with remarkably good figures in the first place. At the end of the day, Britain still has one of the worst heart death rates.
World Health Organisation statistics show how many men per 100,000 die before the age of 75 of coronary heart disease in different countries. The figures are “age adjusted” so they take account of the fact that older people are more likely to die than younger ones.
Former Communist countries such as Latvia have easily the worst figures. Leaving them aside and sticking only to advanced countries, Japan and France have easily the best results. Only 53 per 100,000 died in Japan and 82 in France in 2003. But deaths from heart disease reflect more than just the quality of the medical service. Diet and smoking make a big difference. To be fair to the NHS, we should look, perhaps, only to those countries where diets are not so very dissimilar to be sure. In Australia, for example, 138 died per 100,000 men. In Germany the figure was 170 and in the Netherlands 113. What was the figure in Britain? The death rate was 201 per 100,000. To put it another way, a man living in, say, Australia, is 31 per cent less likely to die prematurely of coronary heart disease than someone in Britain.
How likely are men to die prematurely from coronary heart disease?
(previous figures for 1998 in brackets)
Japan (56) 53
France (85) 82
Netherlands 113
Canada (184) 115
Australia (171) 138
Germany (200) 170
United Kingdom (265) 201
Source: World Health Organisation figures published 2004 relating to 2003 and earlier.
But if Britons do have a particularly high propensity to suffer heart disease because of their lifestyles, one would expect Britain also to have a particularly high rate number of heart operations by-pass operations. It does not.
In around 2000, British surgeons performed open heart surgery, for example, 645 times for every million people in the population compared with 907 times in Switzerland, 904 in the Netherlands, 1061 in Sweden and 1,191 in Germany*. If Britain does indeed have a higher propensity to heart disease, this lack of treatment is all the more dramatic and disturbing.
*Source: European Society of Cardiology (2004) as cited by www.heartstats.org.
'standardised' deaths from cerebro-vascular disease here
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/7/37/35530212.xls
World Health Organisation standardised deaths from coronary heart disease as shown on British Heart Foundation website here.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS
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It's interesting, how the truth can be manipulated by misrepresenting the data. I'm not familiar with Niall Dickson, chief executive of the King's Fund, but I understand that they are an independent charitable foundation that works closely with the NHS. Too closely I suspect.
Posted by: John East at December 9, 2005 04:24 PM