tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
- Lucinda Hiam, honorary research fellow,
- Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder professor of geography
Health chiefs are failing to investigate a clear pattern of worsening health outcomes
Within the first seven weeks of 2018, some 93 990 people died in England and Wales.1 Over the same weeks in the previous five years, an average of 83 615 people died.1 This rise of 12.4%, or 10 375 additional deaths, was not due to the ageing of the population. Ageing is a slow process and leads to slow, not sudden, rises in mortality.2 An additional person died every seven minutes during the first 49 days of 2018 compared with what had been usual in the previous five years. Why?
[h=2]Not the weather or flu[/h] The weather was unusually mild during the initial weeks of this year?very cold weather did not arrive until late February. The mean temperature was 4.1?C across the UK in January 2018, almost half a degree above the average for this time of year.3
Nevertheless, the first seven weeks of 2018 were unusual in terms of the operation of the NHS. On 2 January, after ?an unprecedented step by NHS officials,? thousands of non-urgent operations were cancelled, a clear sign of a system struggling to cope.4 Many hospitals were already at or beyond their safe working levels, ?with high numbers of frail patients stuck on wards for want of social care,?4 and a rise in influenza cases had begun.
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http://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1090
