What you on about? There’s the NHS Info Centre and 9 Public Health Observatories. If you’re talking about budgets there’s SHA’s and Treasury stats. Me no comprende

The body also needs to have its funding protected constitutionally, and the range of statistical oputputs produced enshrined in law so no politician could say “don’t collect those anymore”

We are already seeing a number of regular surveys cancelled (such as social attitutes survey), and consultations over the future of things like NOMIS. Each one is likely to be research that usually produces results conservatives don’t like. Rather than manipulating stats like all parties have done historically, the tories are moving into the area of simply not comissioning the work in the first place.

I was about to agree with you until I saw the comment made by ‘Dick The Prick’.

There are plenty of places to seek legitimate stats already. However, I think it may be better if it was all more centralised and there was more ways of looking at the same information.

@2

The NOMIS consulatation is particularly dubious as that looks likely to severely limit data available to users.

Particularly on unemployment. Interestingly.

The point is that we have a series of misleading statistics from the government. The latest leaflet makes claims about cancer survival which is based upon research about how many people would have survived cancer if Major had improved cancer survival rates. It also gives the number of extra doctors employed in the NHS over the last year in an attempt to claim that they are putting more money into doctors rather than managers. However, what they miss out is that the increase in the number of doctors is half the trend over the last decade, and the fall in the number of managers is equivalent to the fall in the number of managers in 2006! (In other words, in 2006 the fall in managers was the same, but twice as many extra doctors were employed.)

@1 is right, there is data available, but the problem is that the Press never goes back to the source, they print what they are told by the Department of Health. The Chief medical Officer has a reputation to maintain. If the prime Minister misquotes her in a misleading way she will take action to ensure that it does niot happen again. The Prime Minister does not have a reputation worthy of losing, hence why he is happy to mislead the public.

I agree completely with your analysis of the problem Richard, but I think your solution is extremely optimistic.

The constant misuse of statistics by the government is a source of huge frustration to me – something I was very keen to highlight when I wrote to my MP.

However, I strongly suspect that Lansley and Cameron know their stats are dodgy have have made a very deliberate political calculation that they can and will get away with that – as you say, the press don’t tend to check the facts. As such, they have no interest in getting accurate data – it would get in the way of their political argument.

AFZ

5

Just a question from the middle of your post.

Are there more doctors in the NHS now than a year ago?

Thanks

This is a glaring example of why independent monitoring of treatment outcomes is essential in order to highlight healthcare failings:

“An atlas published by the Government that maps variations in health spending and outcomes across England has highlighted some significant regional differences including amputation rates among diabetics. . . .

“Amputation rates among diabetics showed one of the most striking variations. Data revealed that the amputation rate for patients with Type 2 diabetes in the South West (3 in 1000 patients) is almost TWICE the rate in the South East. The Charity Diabetes UK was also concerned that the data showed less than half those with the disease (Types 1 and 2) had received nine key healthcare checks.”
http://www.mddus.com/mddus/news-and-media/news/november-2010/nhs-variation-atlas.aspx

Reliable stats are obviously important but I think this item presupposes that different outcomes might arise as a result of them?

As far as I can tell ALL of the main parties are committed to exactly the same outcome (marketisation of health) and will simply make another argument if certain stats look unfavourable?

This from Colin Leys “If Mr Lansley had taken office last year facing an NHS as it still was in 2000 his project (of covert privatisation) would be unthinkable. In 2000 there were no foundation trusts; no payment by results for hospital treatments; no private health companies already providing NHS acute care and GP services; no independent regulator of a healthcare market (Monitor). Without all these changes, and many others, what Lansley’s Bill now proposes would be unthinkable.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/colin-leys/plot-against-nhs

I seriously doubt that the official NHS Atlas of healthcare outcomes, linked @8 above here, is sufficiently sharply focused to highlight local issues quickly enough to initiate necessary corrective action in response to identified failings and, if so, by what means in future if the strategic health authorities and the PCTs are to go under Lansley’s proposed reforms of the NHS?

Regular, effective monitoring by the Strategic Health Authority should have picked up this gross failing at Stafford Hospital relatively quickly:

“The former head of the health authority which ran Stafford Hospital has apologised to a public inquiry for failing to spot problems there.

“Cynthia Bower was the chief executive of the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority, which ran the hospital at the height of its problems.

“She expressed ‘deep sorrow’ at the inquiry, saying patients had been let down.

“Ms Bower was giving evidence at an inquiry into the hospital’s failings.

“It is looking at the role of regulatory bodies after a higher than expected number of deaths between 2005 and 2008.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-13122885

A timeline of the healthcare failings at Stafford Hospital is here:

“An earlier investigation, by NHS watchdog, the Healthcare Commission, concluded that 400 more people died at Stafford Hospital between 2005 and 2008 than would be expected.

“It said the hospital’s ‘appalling’ emergency care resulted in patients dying needlessly.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/stoke/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8493000/8493964.stm

My own experience suggests that NHS monitoring is too often regarded as an expendable piece of costly bureaucracy. A friend who has long had private healthcare insurance tells me that in her experience with private care in private hospitals, treatment monitoring is taken very seriously as part of a continuing commitment to “customer care” to ensure client loyalty.

[10] “A friend who has long had private healthcare insurance tells me that in her experience with private care in private hospitals, treatment monitoring is taken very seriously as part of a continuing commitment to “customer care” to ensure client loyalty” – then why do so many private patients end up bringing post procedure complications to the NHS?

Remember the NHS was blamed for the death of Penny Campbell – yet the surgeon who operated on her offered no immediate aftercare despite being contacted the next day (Penny Campbell felt “unwell” 1 day post-op) – of course, she was told to contact her GP (or A&E) – in fact anybody except those staff working in the private facility that actually carried out the presumably expensive procedure – how shabby, eh?
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2007/05/25/uk-britain-doctors-timeline-idUKL2542736220070525

So why is lack of adequate aftercare a feature of private health care – could it because the cheque is already in the bank?

@11: “Remember the NHS was blamed for the death of Penny Campbell . . ”

Just as there are NHS hospitals like the Stafford Hospital, there are doubtless some bad private hospitals and healthcare professionals as well. One swallow, doesn’t make a summer. We need to make comparisons between systems. There is nothing to justify what transpired at the NHS Stafford Hospital IMO.

For competitive healthcare markets, motivated by public social insurance schemes, we need to look to other west European countries where healthcare provision is not micromanaged from the centre. In France, residents have a choice of GPs and a choice of hospitals, clinics etc. It’s only recently that patients in England have been permitted choice of hospitals (again) and allowed to move been GPs.

It happens that I don’t live within what was the official catchment area of the nearest hospital to where I live so when Frank Dobson became the first New Labour minister for health, I lost the option of going there. How ridiculous !

As my friend says, when she goes into the private system of healthcare, she is saving the NHS money. She is a discriminating consumer and IMO made a wise decision decades ago to take out private healthcare insurance so she is well placed to make informed comparisons between the public and private systems.

[12] “she is well placed to make informed comparisons between the public and private systems” – based on what, her own experience?

I suppose that’s fine as far as it goes but how much data (on populations) from the private health sector is put into the public domain?

For example, if I have cancer how do I find out if private hospital A has better survival stats than private hospital B or C?

“For example, if I have cancer how do I find out if private hospital A has better survival stats than private hospital B or C?”

Good question. I must admit that I don’t know because the issue has not arisen for me since I don’t have private healthcare insurance. My friend is a retired professional social worker with extensive career experience of liaising between local authority social care departments and healthcare providers.

I have raised the general principle of treatment monitoring with my new local commissioning consortium because I believe it to be crucial. What surprises me is that so little is made of it in the many media reports of the current debates about NHS reforms and the creation of GP-managed commissioning consortia. Treatment monitoring seems to be one of those incidental, forgetable issues at the margin whereas my concern is to prevent the like of Stafford Hospital repeating or the differentially high rate of diabetes-related amputations in rhe NHS SW region.