Posted on 01/17/2002 4:48:52 AM PST by Arkle
NHS patients are getting poorer care than millions of people being treated for a similar price in the US, according to a study.
It found patients treated by a non-profit organisation in California had access to significantly more specialists than those in Britain. They also discovered the US patients spent only a third as much time in hospital as those receiving NHS care.
The University of California team rejected the idea the British health service is efficient and suffers poor performance in certain areas simply because of under-investment.
A spokesman for the British Department of Health said the findings showed there was still a long way to go with the modernisation of the NHS.
In the US Kaiser Permanente, which serves more than six million people in California, had waiting times to see a consultant a third the length of those in the NHS. Kaiser had twice the concentration of obstetricians and gynaecologists and three times the concentration of cardiologists, making it much easier to see a specialist. The report said the US organisation outperformed the NHS because it offered the most cost-effective care to patients, had better integrated care and made better use of information technology.
Kaiser is not a perfect system and has its share of critics in the US, the authors said. But they suggested British people should be asking questions about what the NHS can learn by comparing itself with the American system. They said:. "It is our hope that they will encourage further analysis and policy debate."
Professor Richard Feachem, one of the authors of the report, said: "It is certainly true that the experience of the Kaiser patients in terms of access to care, the quality of it, and the friendliness and responsiveness of nurses is very much better than in the NHS.
"If an NHS patient moved to Kaiser they would be delighted with the experience, and if a Kaiser patient moved to the NHS they would be horrified."
Responding to the findings a spokesman for the Department of Health said the study showed the NHS was 10% cheaper overall and that a comparison between two systems catering for very different patients was difficult... but he added: "The performance achieved by Kaiser underlines that we still have much further to go in terms of modernising the NHS."
The Department of Health also said the areas where Kaiser was outperforming the NHS had already been identified and were included in the NHS Plan. The spokesman said: "These findings do not undermine the long held view that the NHS is highly efficient compared with the great majority of health care systems. "At most they suggest that a small part (one thirtieth) of the US population is covered by a health system that may be more efficient than the NHS.
"Applying the same approach to other European countries would almost certainly reveal that Kaiser was more efficient than any of them too."
The research team chose Kaiser because of its similarities with the NHS, in terms of age, organisation and services provided. After taking account of age and socio-economic differences between Britain and California they found the health care costs per person were similar to within 10%.
The full study will be published in the British Medical Journal.
Tell them to shut up UNTIL THEY VISIT A V.A. HOSPITAL FOR A FEW DAYS.
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