The UK vs Sweden: Is the NHS really so bad?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Cardiology, Epidemiology, Statistics
- Keywords
- mortality, acute myocardial infarction, England, Wales, Sweden, comparison, confidence intervals
- Copyright
- © 2014 Lazaridis et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. The UK vs Sweden: Is the NHS really so bad? PeerJ PrePrints 2:e253v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.253v1
Abstract
Sheng-Chia Chung and colleagues report in The Lancet (23 January 2014) an international comparison of cardiovascular patient mortality between the UK and Sweden. They suggest that “more than 10000 deaths at 30 days would have been prevented or delayed had UK patients experienced the care of their Swedish counterparts.” Further, they estimate that 1741 deaths would have been prevented in the UK had the Swedish pattern of primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and beta-blocker use been replicated in the NHS from 2004 to 2010. However, their study does not provide convincing evidence that faster uptake of primary PCI or beta-blockers on discharge would have had an effect on cardiovascular patient mortality in the UK.