UK ‘ranked 28th among 30 OECD nations for healthcare resources’

A new report has ranked the UK as being one of the lowest performers among countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on a number of key metrics in terms of healthcare service performance.

Carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the report indicated that the UK ranks 28th out of 30 countries for healthcare resourcing, which includes numbers of doctors, nurses, beds and equipment.

This is despite the fact that the country ranks 16th in terms of healthcare spending, suggesting the NHS is not producing value for money. It was also shown that there were 2.8 doctors per 10,000 population in the UK in 2012, compared with an average of 3.2 doctors in other wealthy OECD countries.

Other findings indicated that the NHS has only 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 members of the population – against an OECD average of 4.8 – thus demonstrating the fact that resources are currently stretched in a way that risks driving down performance standards.

Report author Ana Nicholls said: "A tight government budget will make it hard for politicians to fulfil their promises of extra funding, but resourcing will only become a bigger issue as the population ages."