Another area where the NHS does well compared to Europe is in diabetes care. I made this chart from the OECD Health Statistics database. It looks at diabetes mortality for the year 2020 or the most recent year for which data is available. If you take the 15 countries in the old, rich EU-15 and look at their diabetes mortality you will find that the UK is the third best, beaten by Belgium and Finland (again). Finland does very well, France is 16% worse than the UK but Germany is 87% worse. You are almost twice as likely to die of diabetes in Germany than you are in the UK. Avoid Portugal, Austria and Italy where the death rate is comfortably more than twice as high.
Using the OECD Health Statistics database, I charted the UK and German data from 2010 to 2020 below. It shows diabetes mortality increasing 23% over 10 years in the UK. Whilst this doesn’t sound like great news it needs to be borne in mind that diabetes prevalence increased much, much faster in this period. For instance, one estimate of prevalence for England I found showed diabetes increasing 44% in the 9 years from 2008/9 to 2017/18. Not quite the same time period but makes the case that prevalence is way up. This piece talks about diabetes doubling in 15 years. So already good diabetes care in the UK got better faster than the rate of the disease increase in the population leaving the UK third on this metric. It is an example of one of the areas where all developed world health systems have to run really hard just to stand still.
Phil Taylor 