Deaths amenable to health care: Converging trends in the EU?

Amenable mortality has been recently included in the joint monitoring tool by the European Commission and Member States to assess a country's health system performance. Amenable deaths are premature deaths, which should not have occurred at this stage in the light of timely and effective health care. This paper recalculated annual amenable mortality rates for 28EU countries and the EU for the period 1994-2013 based on the recently published list of deaths amenable to health care by Eurostat. Thereby, it offers a consistent calculation of amenable mortality across European Member States and provides time series data on amenable mortality. In addition, a sensitivity analysis of the amenable mortality indicator for varying age limits and attributional weights of circulatory system diseases is carried out. While large improvements were made in reducing amenable deaths in all European countries, great variations persist among Member States. Most of the decreases in amenable mortality are explained by a substantial reduction of deaths due to circulatory system diseases. In addition, even in countries with good national performance on amenable mortality, sub-national analysis shows that great regional disparities exist. The sensitivity analysis revealed that for the large majority of countries results are stable across different attributional weights used for ischaemic heart diseases and cerebrovascular diseases.