LONDON: The UK’s National Health Service has a higher death rate from harm caused by medical treatment than Sudan, new data have revealed. The global state of patient safety 2025 study found the UK ranked in the bottom third – 141 out of 205 countries – for deaths from “adverse effects of medical treatment”, The Telegraph reported.
The UK’s rate of 1.8 per 100,000 people was worse than 25 years ago, when it was 1.5. Meanwhile, countries such as Sudan have seen significant improvements, more than halving to 1.6 over the same period.
Undeveloped or developing countries are less likely to carry out as many medical procedures or treatments as in the UK, while the accuracy of reporting incidents may not be as robust.
However, the UK’s death rate was more than twice that of European counterparts such as Ireland, Switzerland and Norway – deemed to be the safest place for care in the world – but marginally better than the US, and significantly better than France and Greece.
The UK also trails much of the developed world, the safety report reveals, ranking 21st out of 38 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), across a range of safety metrics.
The UK’s most recent data in this area is from 2021, and researchers found that if the UK had matched the best-performing country, Switzerland, in that year, it could have had 22,789 fewer deaths. Other patient safety indicators were deaths of women in pregnancy or childbirth, and baby deaths, such as from premature birth complications, brain damage during delivery, sepsis and other neonatal infections.
The neonatal death rate in the UK has fallen since 2000 but plateaued since 2017, while the OECD average rate has continued to fall. If the UK matched the neonatal death rate of Japan, which ranks first out of OECD countries for this measure, the UK could have had 1,123 fewer neonatal deaths in 2023, researchers found.
