British women are reportedly the worst binge drinkers in the world.
They top all lists for drinking the most amount of alcohol in an unsafe way, a new report has found.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the stats on Wednesday, November 8, after assessing alcohol consumption in 33 different countries.
Researchers defined binge drinking as having at least six alcoholic drinks in a single session.
They found that 26 per cent of women asked were doing this at least once a month. British men were even higher at 45 per cent.
When both sexes were combined, the UK was ranked joint third overall with Luxembourg for binge-drinking rates, behind only Romania and Denmark.
Dr Richard Piper, chief executive of Alcohol Change UK, said: “Alcohol causes too much harm here in the UK. But this is totally avoidable.
“There is an overwhelming need for the government to introduce measures that we know will reduce alcohol harm and save lives such as proper controls on alcohol marketing, introducing minimum unit pricing in England like we already have in Scotland and Wales, and clearer alcohol labelling.”
The report also found that the UK spends more on health care than comparable countries — but has fewer hospital beds and diagnostic tools and pays nurses less.
The UK spends a higher than average proportion of the country's finances on “health system resources” — spending about 11.3 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health in 2022.
GDP is a key economic indicator that represents the total monetary value of all finished goods and services produced within a country's borders during a specific time period, typically a year or a quarter.
The new report found that only five countries — the US, Germany, France, Japan and Austria — spend more than the UK on health system resources. However, despite being a big spender in this respect, the UK still does not rank favourably on a number of healthcare measures.
In the countries the OECD assessed, there were on average 4.3 hospital beds for every 1,000 people in the population in 2021.
But in the UK, it was 2.4 beds for every 1,000 people, with only Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile and Sweden having fewer.
The UK also has fewer magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computerised tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) scanners compared with most of the other countries examined.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told the Guardian: “This report uses data from 2021 and, since then, we have made significant progress to boost bed numbers and diagnostic capacity.
“The NHS has met its target to roll out 10,000 hospital at-home beds ahead of winter and is also delivering 5,000 more permanent hospital beds.
“We will also meet our target to open 160 community diagnostic centres a year early, as a result of the largest central cash investment in MRI and CT scanning capacity in the history of the NHS.
“Over one million staff including nurses have received a 5 per cent pay rise for 2023-24 alongside two one-off payments, this is on top of a pay rise worth 5.5 per cent for newly qualified nurses in 2022-23.”
