Austerity Kills

Surely this shouldn’t be happening even if some did predict austerity leads to real suffering and tragedy.

Health officials are investigating a “statistically significant, sustained” decline in life expectancy among elderly people in some parts of England, amid warnings that cuts to social care and pressures on the NHS may be contributing to earlier deaths.

An alert from a council in the North-west of England warns it was “likely” that in many parts of the region “older people (over 85) are no longer living longer”. Possible explanations for the decline include government cuts to councils’ social care budgets, a lack of capacity in the GP sector or pressure on hospitals, it adds.

Dr John Middleton, vice-president of the Faculty of Public Health, said “inadequate social care and inadequate investment in preventive care for vulnerable older people” was one possible explanation.

Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said “cutbacks in social care and difficulty in accessing healthcare for the elderly” was one possible explanation for falling life expectancy. “The other possibility we need to look at is that these were people who were in the middle of their working ages, particularly in the North of England, during the early 1980s when there was large-scale de-industrialisation, when their health would have been disadvantaged by job loss and dislocation that took place at that time,” he said.

The number of people in the UK who receive state-funded care in the home or in their community has fallen from around 1.8 million in 2008-09 to 1.3 million in 2012-13, with further reductions of an estimated 5.8 per cent last year, according to figures and a recent survey from the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services. This follows government cuts to council budgets, which led to reductions of £3.5bn in their adult social care spending over the past four years.

Official figures show that, in the UK, women’s life expectancy at 85 has fallen slightly in recent years – bucking the expected trends of ever-longer lifespans. Among men, life expectancy at 85 has remained stable nationally, but the email, sent before Christmas and seen by the Health Service Journal, says that in Blackburn and Darwen there have been reductions for both men and women, as well as some signs of a reduction in life expectancy for men at 65.