|
They could, because it also points out the UK had the "fastest reduction in deaths amenable to health care in the past decade" i.e. the most improvement in that category. If you take a look at the raw data, you can see the basis of comparison (four major diseases: heart attack, stroke, breast cancer, colon cancer, + overall mortality data). The biggest outlier for the UK is clearly the cancer survival rate, where it is more than two standard deviations worse than average and this has been known for some time. The underlying reasons are complex, partly social, mostly ones of late diagnosis, partly due to failure to implement good screening programmes; reports on the topic vary in their tendency to blame patients for presenting late or for comorbidity factors, but here's one of the more measured, from 2011: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/files/kf/How-to-improve-c... Most tellingly, with breast cancer, a 2008 report suggested that if you remove all the women who die within a year of diagnosis (whose cancers were likely to have been diagnosed at a very advanced stage), then UK survival rates fall into line with the European average. In other words, the UK has a problem with late diagnosis. Note that the UK also has a better cancer registry. Germany only captures 1% of the population, the UK captures 80%. Unsure whether the OP report has attempted to detect any resulting skew in the statistics. Bottom line: if the UK improves the five-year cancer survival rate to OECD standards - and note that the data in this report is from 2015 - then it will flip its position in those rankings and totally cement the #1 position overall. |