Poor quality of health care was a major driver of excess mortality across conditions, from cardiovascular disease and injuries to neonatal and communicable disorders, a recently published study in the Lancet showed.
The study reports the number of deaths amenable to health care in LMICs and is the first to estimate the proportion of these deaths due to poor quality of care versus non-utilisation of care. This finding has important policy implications for countries pursuing universal health coverage as increased access to poor quality of care is unlikely to improve health outcomes. Our study found that nearly 8 million people die every year because of a lack of access to high-quality care. We found a higher proportion of amenable deaths are among health system users than non-users in LMICs. Deaths caused by poor-quality health care spanned the conditions included in the Sustainable Development Goals, including cardiovascular diseases, neonatal conditions and road traffic accidents. Although the 2016 GBD study did not report numbers of amenable deaths or partition these deaths into the separate contributions of quality of care and utilisation, it did observe substantial disparities in amenable mortality across regions and related to levels of development.
The study was funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its showed that 15·6 million excess deaths from 61 conditions occurred in LMICs in 2016. After excluding deaths that could be prevented through public health measures, 8·6 million excess deaths were amenable to health care of which 5·0 million were estimated to be due to receipt of poor-quality care and 3·6 million were due to non-utilisation of health care. Poor quality of health care was a major driver of excess mortality across conditions, from cardiovascular disease and injuries to neonatal and communicable disorders.
The authors concluded that Countries pursing universal health coverage must put better quality on par with expanded coverage if they are to substantially improve health.
Source: Lancet
