Health and social care cuts ‘responsible for rise in mortality’

Recent cuts to health and social care system funding may be directly responsible for a rise in mortality rates in England and Wales.

Published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has indicated that there were approximately 30,000 excess deaths in 2015, with a large spike in January that year.

This represents one of the largest increases in year-on-year deaths in the post-war period, with the extra deaths defined as being above and beyond what would have been expected if the average age-specific death rates in 2006 to 2014 had continued.

The analysis indicated that the imposition of austerity measures on the NHS has a big part to play in this, in addition to reductions in the welfare budget of £16.7 billion and further cuts to social care spending across England.

As such, deaths among people aged 75 and over – the age group expected to be most dependent on health and social care services – were found to have contributed most to the changes.

Study author Lucinda Hiam said: "Simply reorganising and consolidating existing urgent care systems or raising the agility of the current A&E workforce is unlikely to be sufficient."

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