NHS Wales 'no better or worse' than England, says OECD

The NHS in Wales is performing ‘no better or worse’ than than the health service in England and the rest of the UK, according to a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The report, which is the result of a two year analysis from the OECD into the health service across the UK, claims that ‘no consistent picture emerges of one of the United Kingdom’s four health systems performing better than another’.

This in contrast to comments made by Prime Minister David Cameron, who has suggested that Wales has a ‘second class’ NHS when compared to the health service in England.

In response to the report, Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones has demanded that the Conservative government apologise to Welsh NHS staff for their comments about the performance of the NHS in Wales.

Jones said: "There is a good reason that junior doctors are not on strike in Wales. It is because we value our NHS workforce, and work with them to modernise and bring through change.

"With a growing social care crisis in England, and the continuing doctors' strike, it is time the Tories focused on getting their own house in order. We accept that the NHS in Wales has challenges ahead - just like every healthcare system in Europe - and we are up for meeting that challenge.

"That is why we spend more on the NHS and on social care than in England; why access to cancer drugs is faster and why we are investing more than ever in training nurses and other NHS staff."

The report concludes that there is a ‘clear and consistent commitment to quality of care in all of the UK's health systems’ and commends the UK’s drive to ‘continuously strengthen quality assurance, monitoring and improvement’.

However, the OECD also raises some concerns, noting that the UK falls below international benchmarks for breast, cervical and colorectal cancer survival and that hospital admissions rates for asthma, which should be avoided, are above the OECD average.