Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
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The new performance framework for the NHS in England will assess how well health services are preventing people from dying prematurely, based on the concept of mortality amenable to healthcare. We ask how the different parts of the UK would be assessed had this measure been in use over the past two decades, a period that began with somewhat lower levels of health expenditure in England and Wales than in Scotland and Northern Ireland but which, after 1999, saw the gap closing. ⋯ Amenable mortality is a useful indicator of health system performance but there are many methodological issues that must be taken into account when interpreting it once it is adopted for routine use in England.