Value for Money?! NHS 10th Worst!!
The Euro Health Consumer Index has ranked the NHS a respectable 14th out of 33 it is revealed today. However, in terms of value for money the NHS only tops the bottom ten in Europe:
Dr. Arne Björnberg, Director of the Euro Health Consumer Index, said: “The UK in 2009 has showed surprisingly negative feedback from patient organisations on the waiting time situation, particularly after government spending on the NHS has been increasing heavily.
“It seems that management of the behemoth NHS organisation is difficult to do under a centralised paradigm.”
The report ranked the NHS 23rd out of the 33 countries on ‘bang-for-buck’, a calculation that tries to take into account the different amounts spent on healthcare in each of the countries.
The report said: “The UK has a less prominent position in the bang-for-buck exercise than in previous years – it would seem that the increased healthcare spend in the U.K. has not yet materialised fully in improved healthcare services.”
Impressively the Netherlands consistently tops the Index.
September 29th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Almost inevitable, I reckon. Much of the spending by New Labour was rushed in the 2nd term, after their taking fright in the 1st term at the thought of being called profligate. Ironically, if the Tories had won in 1997, they would no way have been as niggardly for the next few years.
Famine then feast was terrible for discipline.
I see you have a spending clock. Is this your way of saying spending should be cut, right now?
September 29th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
It can be of little surprise.
September 30th, 2009 at 12:19 am
Not particularly wishing to defend the management structure of the NHS, but you’d expect to get more value for money from an organisation that had high capital spending in the past than low capital spending in the past.
A lot of current NHS spending is going on new hospitals, new MRIs, new CAT scanners, etc.
If hospital buildings have a lifespan of 30 or so years, you need to replace 3% every year. But if you don’t build a new hospital building for a while, then you find you need to replace 8-10% for a few years to catch up. That hugely increases capital spending without a commensurate improvement in healthcare; in the short term, capital spending is inefficient as compared to revenue spending.
Add in the fact that since it’s system-wide, medical training (doctors and nurses) is effectively a capital expense; you can only import so many doctors or nurses, you need to train new ones.
So yeah, if you’re comparing a health care system that was 6% of GDP for years but is now 8% against systems that have been 8% for years, you’d expect the recent spending increases to have less impact. The capital built recently will feed into health improvements once capital spending drops and therefore revenue spending rises.