France, Japan and Australia top in dealing with preventable deaths...U.S. bottom!

Jan 9 2008

When it comes to dealing with preventable deaths researchers have found that the French, Japanese and Australians are at the top of the league and the Americans at the bottom.

A team of researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine say if the health system in the United States was as good as those of the top three countries 101,000 lives would be saved each year.

The researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee carried out a study which focused on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations.

They tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they performed; they say such deaths provide an important way of gauging the performance of a country's health care system because the figures are sensitive to improved care, including public health initiatives.

Their rankings were established by taking into account death before age 75 from numerous causes, including heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, diabetes, certain bacterial infections and complications of common surgical procedures.

The researchers say such deaths accounted for 23 percent of overall deaths in men and 32 percent of deaths in women.

France came top with 64.8 deaths deemed preventable by timely and effective health care per 100,000 people, in the study period of 2002 and 2003.

Japan had 71.2 and Australia had 71.3 such deaths per 100,000 people, while the United States had 109.7 such deaths per 100,000 people.

Spain was fourth, followed in order by Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland and Portugal, with the United States last.

According to Nolte the large number of Americans without any type of health insurance (about 47 million people in a population of 300 million according to U.S. government estimates), was possibly a key factor in the poor results of the United States in comparison to other industrialized nations in the study.

When the researchers compared these latest rankings with rankings for the same 19 countries for the period of 1997 and 1998, France and Japan also were also first and second, while the U.S. was 15th; this means the U.S. fell four places.

The researchers say all the countries made progress in reducing preventable deaths from these earlier rankings, with drops on average of 16 percent, but the U.S. decline was only 4 percent.

The research was supported by the Commonwealth Fund, an independent foundation working toward health policy reform and a high performance health system and is published in the journal Health Affairs.

Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen says the fact that other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less, indicates that policy, goals, and efforts to improve health systems make a difference.