Rishi Sunak defends health service as report finds NHS substantially behind peer countries

Rishi Sunak has defended the NHS after a report said it is performing “substantially less well” than similar countries on life expectancy and other healthcare outcomes,.

Commissioned by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and written by The King’s Fund, it said the UK health system’s poor performance on avoidable deaths should be a serious concern for political leaders and policy-makers.

The prime minister is facing a number of NHS challenges, including ongoing pay strikes by junior doctors and a record-high waiting list for treatment, but insisted he is making it "fit for the future" through record investment.

On Monday, Mr Sunak announced a new screening programme for lung cancer which hopes to catch and treat the disease much sooner.

He also said he would continue to make decisions over NHS pay that "people may not like" as he battles to bring down inflation while investing in the health service.

I will have to make decisions that 'people may not like', says Rishi Sunak, as he's pressed on junior doctors' strikes as the NHS is found to be performing 'substantially' less well than similar countries

Mr Sunak's screening announcement on Monday was overshadowed by The King's Fund report, which also found the NHS has substantially fewer key resources than other countries, like beds. It also said the service has a heavy reliance on foreign-trained staff.

However, it described the NHS overall as “neither a leader nor a laggard” among other national health systems.

It compared the NHS with the health systems of 18 similar higher income countries – the original 15 European Union member states, excluding Luxembourg, and the ‘Anglosphere’ (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

Siva Anandaciva, the report’s author and chief analyst at The King’s Fund, said at a briefing: “On healthcare outcomes specifically, both for the outcomes that a system can control and those wider measures that rely on services that keep us healthy… we lag behind our peers. We are not by any means where we should be.”

Also among the report's findings was that the UK performs poorly on healthcare outcomes across several different major disease groups and health conditions linked to avoidable mortality.

It had the fourth- and second-highest rates of preventable and treatable mortality in 2019 among the 19 health systems in the report, with 119 deaths and 69 deaths per 100,000 people respectively.

Cancer survival rates formed the biggest part of preventable mortality, whilst circulatory diseases such as heart attacks and strokes were the main cause of treatable mortality.

Mr Sunak hopes his announcement on Monday will help reduce the number of deaths from cancer, with a new scheme set to screen the people most at risk of developing it in the lungs.

Patients aged 55 to 74 who are current or former smokers will be invited for specialist scans every two years at an annual cost of £270m.

Mr Sunak said it will provide "a lifeline to thousands of families", with a national rollout set to reach 100% coverage by March 2030.

Another key finding from the report was that UK has substantially fewer key physical resources than many of its peers, including MRI scanners and hospital beds.

The UK had the fewest number of MRI scanners among all 19 health systems in 2019, whilst only Sweden had a lower number of general hospital beds per 1,000 people in the same year.

Speaking on Monday, the shadow health secretary said the NHS has been turned into a "sick man of Europe" under 13 years under Conservative leadership.

"The longer the Conservatives are in power, the longer patients will wait", said Wes Streeting.

The NHS 'can no longer claim to be the envy of the world', says Labour's shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting

Mr Anandaciva said capital infrastructure was “absolutely crying out” for investment, and that people from other countries were “really baffled” by the continual lack of investment in this area in the UK.

The report also highlighted the NHS had strikingly low levels of key clinical staff, including doctors and nurses, and is heavily reliant on medical professionals trained abroad.

Mr Anandaciva said that the UK exported a huge amount of nursing talent that is trained in the country and not held onto, instead making up large percentages of medical workforces in countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

The report suggests that British policy makers should “pick out specific areas of learning and interesting practice” from other health systems, rather than attempt an entire reset.

He explained: “There are ways in which other countries, like Belgium and Australia, do long-term workforce planning, where they are thinking about the next 10 to 15 years, which we’ve talked a lot about doing in this country but are still yet to do.”

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