Next time someone tells you that Labour and the Conservatives are identical

[andrewducker]

Notice the trend up throughout the 90s as things got worse and worse, and then the trend down shortly after Labour took office?

They may have done a lot of things wrong, but the NHS is a lot better off than it was.

From

Comments

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

For the reasons you have already described, plus a wide and enthusiastic variety of others, these statistics are basically meaningless. There are now more ways of massaging the numbers than ever, including interesting things like queueing systems to even be allowed to be put on a waiting list. Rather than a waiting list waiting lists.

And that is somewhat meaningless because it's an invented number with no real value.

I'd guess the primary reason the numbers have come down is that Labour have concentrated the central administrative policy on getting the numbers down. So the administrators find ways to do that. And the table looks better. Whether patient care has improved in the slightest as a result is virtually impossible to discern, because actual medicine doesn't really care what your graph says. More diseases are found or invented damned near daily, more cures and treatments for those diseases are found just as frequently, and everybody dies.

oh, and the lovely policy of discharging patients at the earliest possible opportunity is probably helping a fair bit as well. As a Social Care Worker it certainly kept me busy.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

Labour also increased spending on the NHS dramatically. Unless you think this money was entirely wasted, I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume that this might be one of the reasons.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming your question is 'do I think pouring money in has made a difference to waiting time statistics', disregarding any other improvements.

Well, yes. As intimated by my observation that Labour has concentrated almost exclusively on lists and targets. If your core focus is on making statistical tables look better, then that's what'll happen. Or you're doing something very very wrong.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

"Whether patient care has improved in the slightest as a result is virtually impossible to discern"

True from these data but it's not impossible to discern whether patient care has improved. If you look at tables of mortality and morbidity (te latter slightly more dodgy) you see a very cheery graph. It'd be well worth pulling these figures (ONS publish them) and seeing how they compare to the above. Obviously, one can't be sure about what did or didn't cause any change in the mortality rate (or rather, in the rate in which the mortality rate improves, especially compared to other OECD countries) - but it'd be very interesting.

You can massage all figures, but all-cause mortality is one of the harder ones to fudge.

[sigmonster.livejournal.com]

So they do.

They also publish a separate set of life tables.

Life expectancy at birth and at age 65 consistently increased over the last few decades, but the increases are larger in 1997/99 - 2006/08 than in 1988/90 - 1997/99, for both men and woman and for both ages. The "extra" improvement is between 25% and 95% over the 1988/90 - 1997/99 baseline.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks for the direct links, saved a lot of messing around.

Total tangent (always happens to me when I get my head stuck in to these sorts of figures) but I'm interested to note (from an accompanying PDF) that the life expectancy gap between males and females has shrunk from 5.4 years in 1991/93 to 4.2 years in 2006/08 - because male life expectancy improved even more than female.

Hooray for improved life expectancy. It's a good thing to have come to expect.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

How else, other than by collecting statistics, does a government tell if anything is changing?