2. Things you need to know about this release

This article contains UK health spending data first published in the Healthcare expenditure, UK Health Accounts: 2017 release. Comparable data for other countries were retrieved from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) online statistical database, OECD.stat in August 2019. Note that the OECD updates their online dataset twice per year to report the latest data submissions from countries. This means that data for some countries may be revised over the coming months and differ from figures used in this article.

Data in this article relate to the years 2013 to 2017, the period for which we have produced health accounts statistics compliant with current international definitions. The OECD has also published preliminary estimates for health spending in 2018. However, these are projections of health spending and so are not used in this article.

Data are produced to the internationally standardised definitions of the System of Health Accounts 2011: SHA 2011 framework. All EU member states and most other OECD countries measure healthcare expenditure from at least 2014 onwards using SHA 2011 definitions. For some countries, statistics to these definitions are produced for 2013 or earlier.

This article presents comparisons of spending in pounds sterling per person, where spending is adjusted using purchasing power parities. Purchasing power parities (PPPs) are the rates of currency conversion that equalise the purchasing power of different currencies by eliminating the differences in exchange rates between countries. In their simplest form, PPPs are simply price relatives that show the ratio of prices in national currencies used to directly compare a basket of goods and services between countries. The actual individual consumption (AIC) PPPs deflator was used to adjust for price variations, for consistency with OECD statistics, and is available at OECD.stat.

Note that data on OECD.stat are generally presented in US dollars, whereas our statistics have been referenced in pounds sterling. An example of how $PPPs have been converted into £PPPs is provided in the annex.

Note that the figures for spending per person in the UK in this article will differ slightly from those on OECD.stat due to small differences in the population data used by the OECD. This article uses the latest UK population data available on our website as of August 2019.

Further information on health systems in different countries are available in the Health Systems in Transition series produced by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. Further international comparisons of health spending are available in OECD’s Health at a Glance series of publications and the World Health Organization’s Public Spending on Health.