Its time to put our health service in perspective.

Because of the worries we have all had about the confusing events at Stafford Hospital in the last few years it is easy to lose sight of the wider picture, which is that we have a health service in this country that we should be very proud of.

Andy Burnham, secretary of State for health has been proud to announce the findings of a major new international survey on health, the Commonwealth Fund Survey which shows that the United Kingdom's health service is performing very well on a whole range of measures in comparison to 11 other developed countries.

The full findings can be seen by clicking the link above. There are a number of key graphs to be found here.

Here are some of the key findings about the UK:

• We make good use of electronic records. 
  
• Most practices send reminders for preventative or follow up care
  
• We have short waiting times
  
• Insurance is a barrier to treatment in only 6% of cases in UK compared to 48% in US
  
• 89% of Practices in UK provide out of hours care compared to 29% in US

In Stafford we are clearly going to be interested in how good the Health service is in looking at its own performance and learning from mistakes, and how good the service is at listening to patients.

It is interesting to look at figures here.

• "Adverse events" are something that occur in all countries and all countries have systems for measuring them. The UK at 95% has the highest level of Following up adverse events, This compares to the US which has 20% good quality follow up and 45% that needs improvement.
• In UK 89% of Practices Routinely Receive and Review Data on Patient Clinical Outcomes compared to 43% in US.
• In UK 96% of Practices Routinely Receives and Reviews
  Data on Patient Satisfaction and Experience compared to 55% in US and 2% in France 

One key indicator is Physician Views of the Quality of Care Their
Patients Get Throughout the Health Care System 51% of doctors in UK see improvement over the last 3 years compared with 19% in US.

Here are some articles which cover the report.

The Telegraph NHS health care better than America

The Guardian Patient care NHS study

The BBC Health care study

Some thoughts about targets and measurement.

We all know that health care is not always perfect. It is interesting to see that much of the criticism leveled at Stafford Hospital by the opposition has been because they do not like the idea of targets, and measuring what the system does. 

Developing systems which measure performance effectively has not always been either easy or popular but there is a real value to it. The results that we are seeing in the commonwealth Fund Survey show that there is a clear picture emerging of an improving health service, which has the means to learn from mistakes and is making a real difference to the quality of care that patients receive.  

In this country we have a very special health service. Lets value it!