Death: avoiding the unavoidable?

What, as the leaders of the People’s Front for Judea could have asked, has healthcare ever done for health? The answer, as the Judean People’s Front have said is, quite a lot actually. But could it do more? According to the latest figures on deaths avoidable or amenable to current healthcare technologies the answer is yes. In 2014 an estimated 116 500 deaths (nearly a quarter of all deaths) in England and Wales could possibly have been avoided through health or public health interventions.1 This is now the second year in a row in which observed avoidable deaths have slightly increased—bucking a trend (apart from 2008) since 2001 (fig 1⇓). Is this chance variation or the start of a new trend, one perhaps …