"Australia's health system third best" - did the study really say that?

This is what News.com.au reported last Wednesday.

"AUSTRALIA'S healthcare system may come in for constant criticism, but compared to most other countries, it is one of the best.

Australia came third in a list of 19 industrialised countries surveyed for their ability to provide timely and effective healthcare to its citizens."

News.com.au full article:
 http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23026791-23109,00.html

 

Here's an abstract of the study cited in the article.

"Measuring The Health Of Nations: Updating An Earlier Analysis

Ellen Nolte and C. Martin McKee

We compared trends in deaths considered amenable to health care before age seventy-five between 1997–98 and 2002–03 in the United States and in eighteen other industrialized countries. Such deaths account, on average, for 23 percent of total mortality under age seventy-five among males and 32 percent among females. The decline in amenable mortality in all countries averaged 16 percent over this period. The United States was an outlier, with a decline of only 4 percent. If the United States could reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved in the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year by the end of the study period."

Health Affairs: the policy journal of the health sphere:

http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/1/58

 

No, Australia was not awarded a gong for having one of the best healthcare systems in the world.

It merely has less people dying of treatable medical conditions than some other industrialised nations.

Inequity in public health care provision or limited access to private medical services is another matter entirely. As is quality of life for those with treatable illness or disease.

 

Regional and rural Australia, which always seems to be fighting to keep even minimum hospital and medical services alive in local towns, would recognise the difference in emphasis between these two reports on the study.

Here on the NSW North Coast we may not actually die in large numbers from treatable medical conditions, but that doesn't mean that we receive the same level of healthcare as metropolitan areas or that treatment outcomes always favourably compare with that of our city cousins.