United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Region
Medium HALE and Life Expectancy
Medium Gap between HALE and Life Expectancy
Final Longevity Progressiveness Ranking: #15
Final Longevity Progressiveness Score: 0.681
Practical Recommendation Summary: The United Kingdom should address inequalities in health by socio-economic status as bad health is more prevalent among population with lower income and education
Practical Recommendations (Full):
● Implement more widely and deeply approaches to monitoring and improving health care quality. OECD reports that many quality of care indicators are close to or just below the OECD average. Avoidable hospital admissions are also high.
● Modifying or avoiding key risk factors, including tobacco use, unhealthy diet and physical activity. Initiate strategies to improve the health of the nation, promote the importance of focusing on socio-demographic factors to ensure delivery of healthy newborns and decrease the burden of behavioral factors.
● Improving the quality of care and reducing waste elsewhere in the system. From drugs and pharmaceutical waste to biological and radioactive materials, healthcare waste demands expert disposal.
● Undertake sustained effort to reduce risk factors such as high body mass index, high fasting glucose, high blood pressure and high cholesterol that increases with ageing population.
● Initiate more education and training programmes to to sustain improvements in health services. The knowledge and skills of the health and public health workforce needs to be kept up to date and developed.
● Promote research and initiate wider utilization of Artificial Intelligence for preventive medicine. Research is vital in providing the knowledge needed to improve health outcomes and reduce inequalities.
● Dealing with regional inequality. The north of England generally suffers much poorer health than the rest of England, with lower life expectancy and earlier onset of chronic illness and disability. There is a need for economic development and regeneration of poorer parts of the country, and for high-quality health improvement programmes and care services in these areas.
● Health records and linkage to survey data should be used more extensively to refine disease prevalence estimates, and provide more reliable data to guide policy and programmes to address these causes of ill health.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths:
● Healthcare in the United Kingdom is publicly funded, generally paid for by taxation. However, the UK also has a private healthcare sector, in which healthcare is acquired by means of private health insurance.
● Accessibility and affordability of healthcare services: everybody has access to exactly the same health care. Universal health care does not discriminate on any basis.
● Information on patients is shared between medical establishments in the form of electronic health care records.
Weaknesses:
● The most common causes of premature death in 2016 are similar the UK: heart disease; lung cancer; stroke. Deaths due to dementia and Alzheimer disease increased again in 2017 and it remained the leading cause of death in England and Wales, accounting for 12.7% of all deaths registered.
● High level of cancer incidence. UK incidence is ranked higher than 90% of the world.
● The long waiting times becomes the main problem in other universal health care.
Opportunities:
● The digital transformation of the health and social care system. It is part of the ongoing commitment to introducing new technologies into the NHS in order to reduce the burden on clinicians and to enable staff to provide enhanced levels of care.
● Growing longevity economy. The ageing market is increasingly significant. In the UK alone, consumers aged 50+ spend over £500bn each year. This market segment is also growing faster than any other – both in absolute terms, as the number of older people rises, and as a proportion of total consumer spending.
Threats:
● An ageing population: health inequality is growing, the population is ageing and the NHS will need to adapt.
● Evolving healthcare needs that lead to increase in healthcare costs, such as the increase in cases of obesity and diabetes, antibiotic resistance, high level of cancer incidence.
● Estimated costs of progress in medical technology equal at least an extra £10bn a year.
SWOT Conclusions
Strengths Analysis:
● Health care system is government-sponsored, and it is dependent on need to be cured, not ability to pay. Government through legislation initiatives protects people from the heavy financial costs of healthcare.
● Access to care is generally good. The health service provision is with relatively low administrative costs using cheaper generic medicines.
● It performs well in managing certain long-term health problems such as diabetes.
● Out-of-pocket payments are low, and few people report skipping consultations due to the cost of care (4.2% compared to an average of 10.5% among 17 OECD countries with comparable data).
● More than half of the English population successfully met the government guideline of five portions of fruit and vegetables per day. As well as maintaining a healthy diet, the government recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week.
Weaknesses Analysis:
● Their active government’s role in healthcare weakens the functionality of market mechanisms.
● The tight control undertaken by government in regards to medical expenses has resulted in a lack of medical resources, such as equipment, doctors and nurses in public hospitals.
● Although the gap has closed over the last decade for stroke and several forms of cancer, the mortality rate in the UK among people treated for some of the biggest causes of death, including cancer, heart attacks and stroke, is higher than average among comparable countries. The UK also has high rates of child mortality around birth.
● Unhealthy lifestyles are reducing the quality of life for many British adults and adolescents. Smoking and alcohol consumption among adults have declined over time, but drunkenness among adolescents remains an important concern. Among 15-year olds, 30.5% have been drunk at least twice in their life. Prevalence of obesity in the UK is 27%, the sixth highest in OECD countries and the highest in Western Europe. A further 36% of the population are overweight but not obese.
Medium Gap between HALE and Life Expectancy
Final Longevity Progressiveness Ranking: #15
Final Longevity Progressiveness Score: 0.681
Practical Recommendation Summary: The United Kingdom should address inequalities in health by socio-economic status as bad health is more prevalent among population with lower income and education
Practical Recommendations (Full):
● Implement more widely and deeply approaches to monitoring and improving health care quality. OECD reports that many quality of care indicators are close to or just below the OECD average. Avoidable hospital admissions are also high.
● Modifying or avoiding key risk factors, including tobacco use, unhealthy diet and physical activity. Initiate strategies to improve the health of the nation, promote the importance of focusing on socio-demographic factors to ensure delivery of healthy newborns and decrease the burden of behavioral factors.
● Improving the quality of care and reducing waste elsewhere in the system. From drugs and pharmaceutical waste to biological and radioactive materials, healthcare waste demands expert disposal.
● Undertake sustained effort to reduce risk factors such as high body mass index, high fasting glucose, high blood pressure and high cholesterol that increases with ageing population.
● Initiate more education and training programmes to to sustain improvements in health services. The knowledge and skills of the health and public health workforce needs to be kept up to date and developed.
● Promote research and initiate wider utilization of Artificial Intelligence for preventive medicine. Research is vital in providing the knowledge needed to improve health outcomes and reduce inequalities.
● Dealing with regional inequality. The north of England generally suffers much poorer health than the rest of England, with lower life expectancy and earlier onset of chronic illness and disability. There is a need for economic development and regeneration of poorer parts of the country, and for high-quality health improvement programmes and care services in these areas.
● Health records and linkage to survey data should be used more extensively to refine disease prevalence estimates, and provide more reliable data to guide policy and programmes to address these causes of ill health.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths:
● Healthcare in the United Kingdom is publicly funded, generally paid for by taxation. However, the UK also has a private healthcare sector, in which healthcare is acquired by means of private health insurance.
● Accessibility and affordability of healthcare services: everybody has access to exactly the same health care. Universal health care does not discriminate on any basis.
● Information on patients is shared between medical establishments in the form of electronic health care records.
Weaknesses:
● The most common causes of premature death in 2016 are similar the UK: heart disease; lung cancer; stroke. Deaths due to dementia and Alzheimer disease increased again in 2017 and it remained the leading cause of death in England and Wales, accounting for 12.7% of all deaths registered.
● High level of cancer incidence. UK incidence is ranked higher than 90% of the world.
● The long waiting times becomes the main problem in other universal health care.
Opportunities:
● The digital transformation of the health and social care system. It is part of the ongoing commitment to introducing new technologies into the NHS in order to reduce the burden on clinicians and to enable staff to provide enhanced levels of care.
● Growing longevity economy. The ageing market is increasingly significant. In the UK alone, consumers aged 50+ spend over £500bn each year. This market segment is also growing faster than any other – both in absolute terms, as the number of older people rises, and as a proportion of total consumer spending.
Threats:
● An ageing population: health inequality is growing, the population is ageing and the NHS will need to adapt.
● Evolving healthcare needs that lead to increase in healthcare costs, such as the increase in cases of obesity and diabetes, antibiotic resistance, high level of cancer incidence.
● Estimated costs of progress in medical technology equal at least an extra £10bn a year.
SWOT Conclusions
Strengths Analysis:
● Health care system is government-sponsored, and it is dependent on need to be cured, not ability to pay. Government through legislation initiatives protects people from the heavy financial costs of healthcare.
● Access to care is generally good. The health service provision is with relatively low administrative costs using cheaper generic medicines.
● It performs well in managing certain long-term health problems such as diabetes.
● Out-of-pocket payments are low, and few people report skipping consultations due to the cost of care (4.2% compared to an average of 10.5% among 17 OECD countries with comparable data).
● More than half of the English population successfully met the government guideline of five portions of fruit and vegetables per day. As well as maintaining a healthy diet, the government recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week.
Weaknesses Analysis:
● Their active government’s role in healthcare weakens the functionality of market mechanisms.
● The tight control undertaken by government in regards to medical expenses has resulted in a lack of medical resources, such as equipment, doctors and nurses in public hospitals.
● Although the gap has closed over the last decade for stroke and several forms of cancer, the mortality rate in the UK among people treated for some of the biggest causes of death, including cancer, heart attacks and stroke, is higher than average among comparable countries. The UK also has high rates of child mortality around birth.
● Unhealthy lifestyles are reducing the quality of life for many British adults and adolescents. Smoking and alcohol consumption among adults have declined over time, but drunkenness among adolescents remains an important concern. Among 15-year olds, 30.5% have been drunk at least twice in their life. Prevalence of obesity in the UK is 27%, the sixth highest in OECD countries and the highest in Western Europe. A further 36% of the population are overweight but not obese.