Stephen Hawking says Jeremy Hunt is wrong and there's 'overwhelming evidence' the NHS is failing

The scientist says the Health Secretary is 'cherry-picking' evidence to support his claims about a seven day service

Prof Hawking has accused Jeremy Hunt of trying to distract from the true crisis affecting the NHS (Getty)

Stephen Hawking has hit back at Jeremy Hunt, saying there is “overwhelming evidence” that the NHS is failing and inadequate funding is to blame.

The theoretical physicist was writing in response to an article by the Health Secretary where Mr Hunt defended his changes to the way the NHS is funded and managed.

The row began last week when Professor Hawking claimed the Government had “cherry-picked” favourable evidence, disregarding proper science and weakening the health service as a whole by slashing funding, demoralising staff with curbs on pay and cutting social care support.

The scientist, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1962 said he feared the service was moving towards “a US-style insurance system”.

In a speech to the Royal Society of Medicine he singled out Mr Hunt for criticism by deriding his claim that 11,000 patients a year die at hospitals because of understaffing.

He said four of the eight studies by Mr Hunt to back up this claim were not peer reviewed and he had ignored 13 others which had contradicted it.

“When public figures abuse scientific argument, citing some studies but suppressing others, to justify policies that they want to implement for other reasons, it debases scientific culture”, he said.

But Mr Hunt hit back in an article in the Sunday Telegraph claiming it was Prof Hawking who was making “a series of claims about the NHS without any evidence at all”.

Jeremy Hunt has accused Prof Hawking of ‘pernicious falsehood’ (Getty)

He said that far from privatising the health service “the evidence suggests the opposite” and that the private sector accounted for only 7.7 per cent of the total NHS spend – up from 0.1 per cent last year.

He also defended himself against claims of “cherry-picking” by saying: “Researchers often disagree so you do have to make a judgement – and I based mine on the Fremantle study of 2015 because it was quite simply the most comprehensive and detailed paper ever done on the topic.

“No responsible health secretary could have ignored it, not least one wanting the NHS to be the safest healthcare system in the world.

“Unfortunately the ‘cherry-picking’ on this occasion was done by others not wanting to believe what every doctor in their heart knows to be true: we desperately need to improve the quality of care offered to those admitted at weekends.”

Now Prof Hawking has issued a rebuttal, writing in the Guardian that Mr Hunt’s article admits he based his findings on only one paper – the Fremantle study published in the British Medical Journal in 2015 – which he said was “disputed”.

He pointed out that the author of the study, Professor Nick Fremantle, had himself explicitly warned that “to assume these excess deaths are avoidable would be rash and misleading”.

Prof Hawking said: “As a patient who has spent a lot of time in hospital, I would welcome improved services at the weekend. For this, we need a scientific assessment of the benefits of a seven-day service and of the resources required, not misrepresentation of research.

He claimed that Mr Hunt was used raw figures to disguise the fact that the NHS was facing a “humanitarian crisis”.

Prof Hawking said: “Hunt’s statement that funding and the number of doctors and nurses are at an all-time high is a distraction.

“Record funding is not the same thing as adequate funding. There is overwhelming evidence that NHS funding and the numbers of doctors and nurses are inadequate, and it is getting worse.

“The NHS had a £2.4bn shortfall in funding in 2015-16, bigger than ever before. NHS spending per person will go down in 2018-19.”