Measuring health output productivity and equity: future challenges

Over the past ten years, the UK has seen a very substantial rise in healthcare spending,according to the Review carried out by Sir Derek Wanless and colleagues,the five years since 2002 have witnessed unprecedented levels of government investment in the NHS.… Over that period, real spending on the NHS has risen by nearly 50 per cent. … the proportion of the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to health care spending has grown to ... within distance of the European Union average” (Wanless, 2007, page xviii). This increase in spending is illustrated in Figure 1. Spending includes both public and private but it is evident that the public part is the main area of expansion, and that this has increased by more than 1.5 percentage points of GDP, which is a highly significant change over this period.