Thaindian News

London, Oct 13 (IANS) Thousands of individuals in Britain are dying every year from treatable conditions at the hands of the National Health Service (NHS) because of Whitehall bureaucracy, a report has stated.

At least 12,000 patients a year are dying from cancer, flu, pneumonia and other infections when their deaths could have been avoided in what has been branded “a colossal waste of lives and money”, the Daily Express reported.

Despite billions of pounds being pumped into the healthcare system for decades, Britain trails other leading European countries when it comes to saving lives, the report adds.

As per a major study from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a huge increase in health care spending since 1999 had no discernible effect on death rates.

Matthew Sinclair, the group’s director, said: “We need to learn lessons from European countries with healthcare systems that don’t suffer from the same degree of political management, monopolistic provision and centralisation.

“This is a colossal waste of lives and money.”

The report draws on a study, entitled Wasting Lives, an analysis of World Health Organisation mortality data to estimate the number of deaths that could have been avoided in the NHS since the 1980s.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance report said because the NHS is not up to the standard of comparable nations like the Netherlands, France and Spain, people are dying who should otherwise have survived.

In 2008, the latest year for which data is available, 11,749 more deaths occurred in the UK than if it had matched the average mortality rates in neighbouring countries.

This is more than four times the number of deaths from road accidents that year and equivalent to 2,000 more deaths than those related to alcohol.

The report said: “The NHS is too centralised, overly-managed by politicians and is too insulated from competition.”