Yuen P (ed.), Compendium of Health Statistics 2005–2006 (17th Edition) for the Office of Health Economics, Radcliffe Medical Press, 2005, 294pp. ISBN 1 84619 002 9

✍ Scribed by Michael Rigby

• Book ID: 102260386
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 34 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0749-6753
• DOI: 10.1002/hpm.829

✦ Synopsis

This latest statistical compendium from the Office of Health Economics has all the comprehensiveness and authority expected from OHE publications, and the clarity of presentation typical of Radcliffe Medical Press. It will be few people's bedtime reading, but an invaluable reference source for many.

Split into four sections-Population, Mortality and Morbidity; UK Healthcare Expenditure and Cost of the NHS; Hospital Services; and Family Health Services, the compendium presents a large range of traditional statistical analyses in clear and consistent format, composed of 177 tables and 78 figures. As appropriate, statistics are presented for the four UK home countries and for the United Kingdom in total. Time trends are a regular and welcome feature. International comparisons are consistently with the OECD and EU countries, and are helpful but with comparatively few surprises. As usual, the United Kingdom shows up well but seldom best, with the amount of health and healthcare achieved for the constrained expenditure continuing to be impressive whilst begging the question of whether the investment is inadequate for the challenge.

Thus, this latest update of the OHE statistical series continues to be up-to-date and valuable. Yet at the same time there is a disappointingly traditional feel to the text, with many of the modern issues and questions not addressed.

For instance, in the demographic section, the compendium, like so many official sources of statistics, cannot identify the child population according to the legal definition of children in the United Kingdom, which is congruent with that of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child-any persons up to 18 years of age. By adopting the traditional (and admittedly more readily available) three quinquennial age groups of 0-14 years, it means that the top 3 years of childhood are lost, and issues of adolescence are merged with those of young adulthood.

Despite being told that mental disorders are by far the biggest single cause of days of certified incapacity (32%), and are one of the four largest reasons for patient consultation with doctors, we can learn very little about mental health services because of the traditional hospital inpatient bed and family health service construct of the compendium. Similarly, though the analyses rightly draw attention to the increasing proportion of healthcare and health expenditure committed to the increasingly elderly population, there is no reference to day hospitals or integrated forms of non-inpatient care. Though the proportion of those waiting for elective admissions who will be treated as day cases has risen from 48% to 57% in the last