Recent statistics showed that the death rate in England in 2015 has the biggest annual rise since the Second World War. Health experts blamed crisis in elderly care as the cause of the higher fatality rate.
The Daily Mail reported that official figures have revealed that there were 528,340 deaths in England in 2015. This number is five percent higher compared to 2014. This is also the highest annual rise since the Second World War in 1968. The annual fatality rate started to climb in 2011, after four decades of steady decline.
Advisers to Public Health England (PHE) called for a national investigation as they blamed the alarming rate of people who died in 2015 to the crisis in elderly care. They said that the big jump in the number of death rate was a "strong and flashing amber warning light [that] something is making the population more vulnerable to avoidable death."
In a report of BBC News, Dominic Harrison, a professor at the Central Lancashire University and Blackburn, said that the reduction in local authority social care budgets in England resulted to the rise of death rates. "Cuts to meals on wheels services, for example, could mean more elderly people go through entire days without seeing anyone else, and if they are ill this would mean they deteriorate without anyone noticing," he explained.
"One of the things this data might be telling us is that that it is just not possible for the health and social care system to contain costs, improve quality, reduce inequality and improve outcomes within such a rapidly diminishing resource envelope," Harrison added.
According to Professor John Newton, PHE chief knowledge officer, the trend should be monitored. "There is often no obvious pattern to this but it is clearly important to keep a close eye on the trends, and consider a range of possible explanations."
On the other hand, David Buck, a senior health officer, agreed that the rise of death rate should be thoroughly investigated. "Public Health England, as a guardian of the nation's healthcare needs to get behind this and investigate more thoroughly."
