“Indisputable” new research has linked government cuts in adult social care and health spending to nearly 120,000 “excess” deaths in England since 2010.
The research, published just before midnight last night (Wednesday) by the online journal BMJ Open, concludes that people over 60 and residents of care homes have been particularly affected by the spending cuts.
And it warns that the cuts could continue to be responsible for an additional death toll of up to 100 deaths a day if significant extra funding is not found.
The researchers say the deaths are more strongly linked with cuts to social care than health spending, with every £10 drop in spending per head of population on social care associated with five extra care home deaths per 100,000 of the population.
The researchers from King’s College London; University College London; Oxford and Cambridge Universities; the PILAR Research Network; the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and the University of the Philippines, point out the real term cuts of 1.19 per cent a year in social care spending between 2010 and 2014.
Their findings show that deaths in England fell by an average of 0.77 per cent a year between 2001 and 2010, but increased by an average of 0.87 per cent a year between 2011 and 2014.
They say that government spending cuts were linked to 45,368 excess deaths between 2010 and 2014, and are set to be linked to an estimated 150,000 further deaths between 2015 and 2020, equivalent to nearly 100 extra deaths every day.
Combining the projected excess deaths and the deaths observed between 2010 and 2014 translates to around 120,000 excess deaths from 2010 to 2017, they say.
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