Massive rise in co-morbidities should lead to growth for private sector
Guess what the increase in the number of people admitted via accident and emergency to a hospital bed with more than five co-morbidities has been over the last decade in the NHS in England?
The numbers have QUADRUPLED from 400,000 to just over 1.6m in the nine years to 2015/16, according to Health Foundation, a UK think tank which has just released a paper on the subject. And the number of over 85s similarly admitted has risen by 58.9%. The total number of emergency admissions rose 42% over the last twelve years.
This indicates a severe decline in healthiness and would go a long way towards explaining why life expectancy in the UK, France and Germany is now falling. It is also catastrophic if you are tasked with running a hospital. To read the report click here.
Meanwhile increasingly we hear that attempts to reform the English NHS have failed. Very few of the things envisaged in Simon Stevens’ Five Year Forward View have actually been actioned. This is important because the government relied on these reforms to increase productivity and quality. The latest is the announcement that the government is to scrap the disastrous Lansley reforms of 2012.
For us, it also highlights the size of the problem faced by the state particularly in countries such as the UK and Sweden where hospital bed numbers have reduced substantially in the last decade. The report states: “These trends are making it increasingly difficult for hospitals to reliably deliver elective care. Although the overall balance between emergency and elective bed days has not changed markedly over the last decade, bed occupancy rates have increased and are now routinely above 90% in England. With such little spare capacity, hospitals are struggling to accommodate sudden and unpredictable increases in emergency admissions, meaning that elective care is cancelled or postponed.”
European healthcare systems generally are failing to carry out structural reforms of how healthcare is delivered and, at the same time, face a huge increase in the seriously ill. It is clear when you look at areas such as the roll-out of digital and telehealth solutions in primary care that the public sector is completely incapable of producing viable large-scale change. It is for-profit groups like Medgate in Switzerland, Kry in Sweden and babylon in the UK who are doing so.
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Max Hotopf or call 0207 183 3779.