Measuring the health of nations: analysis of mortality amenable to health care

The authors of this paper, Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee, have alerted us to an error in their data processing, which affects figures 1 and 2 in their paper (BMJ 2003;327:1129-32). Deaths from colon cancer had been mistakenly excluded for Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden. In figure 1 the standardised death rates for “amenable mortality” for these countries are 81.43, 71.81, 74.42, 66.50, and 58.46 respectively. In figure 2 the respective values for “amenable mortality plus ischaemic heart disease” are 109.29, 114.99, 106.17, 97.09, and 87.50 respectively. In recalculating the data for those countries, the authors also discovered a minor miscalculation for the UK values (which should be 87.46 in figure 1 and 129.98 in figure 2). The revised values slightly affect the rankings (although not the United Kingdom), but the authors state that the revisions do not at all affect the overall conclusion of their paper.