NHS boss, Simon Stevens is either ignorant or lying

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The New Puritan who we've put in charge of the NHS is off on one again:

The head of the NHS is calling for increases in the price of cheap alcohol amid warnings that heavy drinking is taking a “huge” toll on Accident & Emergency departments. 

This is a straightforward pitch for minimum unit pricing. The problem is that we already have some of the highest taxes on booze in Europe and, just as importantly, it is already evident that this tax is leading to the manufacture and distribution of illegally manufactured or smuggled spirits.

Now it's true that some A&E departments have a problem with alcohol-related patients but it isn't true that this has changed much over the past couple of decades. Indeed there's something of a myth that A&E Departments are quiet, calm places until 11pm on a Friday when they transform into a Hogarthian hell-hole of drugged and boozed up patients. In reality there are fewer people in A&E departments at these times - the peak hour according to the King's Fund is 10am on a Monday morning. And, as studies have shown, we really have little or no idea as to the real scale of alcohol-related attendance at A&E.

Given the limitations in data coverage and quality, A&E diagnosis data should be treated with caution. As the level of missing data is so high, and coding is largely not comparable between providers, this field should only be used for Trust-specific analyses (e.g. to produce profiles, possibly focusing on specific diagnoses, within single Trusts).

What we do know is that the sort of people Simon Stevens believes he is targeting represent a very small part of the A&E departments' work - just 0.4% in 2008/9 according to NHS England. But despite the lack of good information (a problem caused by the excellent news that doctors and nurses in A&E are more bothered with sorting peoples problems out than with how many sherbets they've had before arriving) this doesn't stop statements such as this:

Latest figures show that 20 per cent of A&E attendances are alcohol related, a figure which rises to 80 per cent during peak weekend periods on Friday and Saturday nights.

It may well be the case that these figures are right but it still doesn't tell us that introducing a minimum price will make a jot of difference. I'm guessing that many of that 80% on Friday and Saturday nights consumed much of their alcohol in licensed premises - meaning they're paying well above the 50p per unit that the health fascists want to introduce.

Not content with peddling fictions about drinking, Mr Stevens has a side-swipe at sugar:

Mr Stevens said heavy drinking and soaring levels of sugar consumption by the British public were now two of the most urgent health problems facing the nation, 

Soaring sugar consumption? An explosion in consumption that has seen our sugar intake fall significantly since the 1970s?  Here are the stats from Australia - they're not much different in the UK:

The AHS (Australian Health Survey) was conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which also conducted Australia’s last national dietary survey of adults and children in 1995, so now we have insights into how the diet of Australians has changed over the intervening period of approximately 16 years. Here are some of the top-line results relating to sugar.

• Intake of total sugars has fallen in men, women and children.
• The percentage of dietary energy from total sugars has also fallen.
• Carbohydrate intake has fallen, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of energy.

Total energy intake has also fallen.

Simon Stevens is simply not telling us the truth.

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The AHS was conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which also conducted Australia’s last national dietary survey of adults and children in 1995, so now we have insights into how the diet of Australians has changed over the intervening period of approximately 16 years. Here are some of the top-line results relating to sugar.
• Intake of total sugars has fallen in men, women and children.
• The percentage of dietary energy from total sugars has also fallen.
• Carbohydrate intake has fallen, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of energy. Total energy intake has also fallen.
- See more at: http://scepticalnutritionist.com.au/?p=1438#sthash.9YpE5HzL.dpuf